14 DAY TRIAL // One of the grating parts about the IT market is that it has been kind of slow over the past quarter, but it looks like things are finally starting to look up, especially now that PC vendors are getting past the defective Intel chipset issue.
Intel was quite eager to score huge shipments when it released the Sandy Bridge collection of Core CPUs and their assorted chipsets.
Unfortunately, not long after the release, the Santa Clara, California-based company found a critical design flaw in the 6-Series Cougar Point.
Said defect caused SATA 3.0 Gbps ports to degenerate and prompted a mass recall of all motherboards and notebooks based on it.
The fixed, B3 stepping has since come out, but companies had to, in the meantime, just watch their sales plummet.
Not only that, but they were unable to even launch any new products because of the problem, as only now is the supply chain recovering, though the Japan disaster might have something to say about that.
Either way, it looks like IT players from around the world are making new unveilings, like Toshiba just showed off the Portege R835.
Now, Digitimes reports that, with the stream of laptops resuming, sales of notebooks during the month of March will grow, sequentially, by 40 to 50 percent.
HP, Acer, ASUS are all said to be competing against each other over how many orders they can squeeze out of Wistron, Pegatron Technology, Quanta Computer and Compal Electronics.
Pretty much every maker of laptops is taking higher orders, and while this has been stretching production capacity of ODMs thin, it still led to better availability and, thus, heightened shipments.
What remains to be seen is how frequent new releases get and if April sales end up boasting a similar sequential increase as March is expected to.