14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that every week we learn something more of what is in store of the touch-based laptop market, or what analysts or companies expect from that segment, but this may be the most ambitious view yet.
Sources from the upstream supply chain, which Digitimes has contacted, have painted a very promising picture of this particular market segment.
It is their belief that, while overall notebook shipments will only grow by 4-5% in the second quarter of the year (2013), touch-based models will experience a surge of 70%.
That would put them at 4.2 million shipments, give or take a few thousands, which would probably not be possible if the production yield rate of touch panels hadn't been improving.
And as touch panel prices are about to drop from $70-80 (54-61 Euro) to $50 (38 Euro), so will the overall prices of notebooks.
In fact, costs may very well fall significantly, although not in the second quarter, but the third quarter instead.
Together with the pressure on the part of Windows 8 to include touch support on all laptops, the market share will rise to 15-20% by the end of the year, maybe even more.
It will all depend on how sales behave during the second half of the year. In 2Q (April-June), shipment levels will supposedly stabilize by the end of April, and drift back in May, only to jump again in June, as soon as Intel releases the Haswell line of CPUs, and AMD sets loose whatever APUs is has prepared as a counter to its rival's collection.
If the upward trend carries over to the third quarter (July-September), the projected shipment strength of Q4 (holiday season) may just add enough to the total for the 15-20% prediction to come true. We'll just have to wait and see, as always.