Even though there were, at the start of the year, some concerns that the netbook market was getting saturated, a new batch of graphics and CPU solutions restored interest in this segment. Now, analysts are once again enforcing their previous predictions that this netbook market will keep growing at a rapid pace over the next few years. The most recent press release from ABI Research definitely stays true to this outlook, and even expects the number of shipments to double by 2013.

Netbooks have been seeing a very strong consumer interest because of their emphasis on value rather than performance, but the latter aspect has actually gone up and, now, even better multimedia capabilities are available on such devices. Granted, education remains a “strong market driver” but entry-level mobile PCs are also being bought as complimentary devices by end-users. Now that the market is finally settling down in a stable form, shares have begun to shift among vendors and some smaller players will supposedly exit the market.

ABI Research expects about 60 million netbooks to be sold this year. This figure will jump to almost double by 2013 and will continue to surge until 2015. In 2009, about half a dozen vendors owned 78% of the entire market, with Acer and ASUS being the most prominent figures. Other companies may decide to rethink their strategies, such as Gigabyte. This supplier may end up exiting the competition because it only held 0.1% of all sales last year.

“Instead of having a preeminent two,” notes principal analyst Jeff Orr, “it looks as if only Acer will continue to maintain its commanding lead; but at the same time there are more vendors competing head-to-head. Most of the others major names – HP, Dell, Lenovo – increased their market shares in 2009, while Samsung lost a couple of percentage points.”