14 DAY TRIAL // It appears that ASUSTek chairman Jerry Shen is confident that his company will ship no less than 5 million Eee PC units this year alone. Now, don't think that Jerry Shen is going to change the company's policy and manufacture more Eee PCs just to achieve this target. No, far be it from him - he's just positive that ASUSTeK will move a total of 6.6 million notebooks (excluding Eee PCs) by the end of this year. Talk about high-hopes.
As most of you already know, ASUS has unveiled its new lineup of Eee PCs at this year's Computex trade show, in Taipei, Taiwan. The highly anticipated lineup brought to light two new models, namely the Eee PC 901 and the 10-inch Eee PC 1000. The only problem right now is that none of the users looking to get their hands on one of these Eee PCs can do so. And the main reason for this "inconvenience" is that Intel isn't yet ready to deliver to ASUS its Intel Atom processor, which is supposed to power the new ASUS netbook. Sadly, the situation will most likely continue to be like this until sometime in September 2008, when Intel said it would be capable of mass-producing the Intel Atom.
Another thing that Mr. Jerry Shen might have overlooked in his estimations is that ASUS' Eee PC is now facing very strong competition. Don't forget that MSI's Wind sub-notebook also promises to bring better performance in a more elegant 10-inch design. So, we really have to wonder whether Jerry Shen's statements are based on real facts or they just express the company's target.
Still, according to an IDC forecast, the market will see about three million low-cost notebooks (netbooks) being sold this year. We should mention one more detail, though: the forecast obviously included all the other players on the nebook market, and not only ASUS. Jerry Shen commented on the IDC forecast and said that market size should hit 10 million units, with ASUS being responsible for half of that number. Now, isn't that wishful thinking?