14 DAY TRIAL // The netbook market saw a spectacular growth in 2009, to the point where PC suppliers made dramatic changes to their roadmaps and marketing tactics. The most obvious example of such a company is Acer, whose main focus in 2010 will be to outsell its rivals on the netbook front and, if possible, surpass Dell on the PC market as a whole. Unfortunately, more recent reports seem to indicate that, despite marketing efforts, sales of Pine Trail netbooks did not rise to expectations, causing top players like HP and Dell to have second thoughts.
Digitimes reports that both Dell and HP were faced with lower than expected netbook sales, which made them significantly reduce their investments in the 10-inch netbook market segment. Moving forward, they will pay more attention to the AMD-based 11.6-inch notebook market which, they hope, will bring enough profits to offset or, at least, make up for the insufficient performance of netbooks.
Not only that, but HP is supposedly even considering pulling out of the 10-inch netbook competition completely, similar to how most second-tier and white-box vendors have already thrown in the towel.
With Dell and HP no longer putting up a fight in this area, the market will be fought over by Samsung, ASUS and, of course, mobile PC advocate Acer. In the case of all three, netbooks account for a very large portion of their total laptop shipments, which makes it unlikely that they would also start having second thoughts about their position.
One should keep in mind that, regardless of Pine Trail's results, analysts still foresee a steady market share increase over the next few years, which more than justifies the willingness of these three to keep up the effort.
As a side effect of this slowdown of the netbook market, it is possible that vendors will start being more cautious when considering smartbooks as well. Of course, whether this occurs, or whether HP really pulls out, remains to be seen.