14 DAY TRIAL // That the netbook market is being unfavorably affected by tablets is no longer news, but it looks like the trend will continue now that even ASUS has decided, or so reports claim, to reduce orders for Eee PCs.
Things on the netbook market are definitely not going as well as makers of such things expected and hoped early last year.
Though market saturation was showing its effect and somewhat slowing down the growth of the segment, the general idea was that sales would keep growing for years.
Then, tablets appeared and users were quick in steadily decreasing the attention they paid to netbooks and, by extension, the level of demand.
The latest development in this area has ASUS as the star, the company having reportedly decided to reduce orders of Eee PCs than the levels it previously had Quanta Computer and Compal Electronics working on.
ASUS' notebook shipments have apparently held steady, but netbooks have seemingly lost their place as mainstream mobile PC.
In the meantime, the Eee Pad Transformer has been selling strongly, with 700,000 or even 800,000 units expected to be reached by the end of the ongoing third quarter.
The fact that this slate now has the Android 3.2 OS and its successor is bound for October, at the same time as NVIDIA's Kal-El, no doubt have something to do with this.
Nevertheless, even with such a promising start for the Eee Pads, ASUS could still see some financial repercussions from the slowdown in netbooks shipments, since the 2011 overall notebook share might end up staying flat.
ASUS hopes to sell two million Eee Pad Transformers by the end of the year (2011). What remains is to see how the other slate, the Eee Pad Slider, does and if, when taken along with the other tablets, the sales it scores are enough to offset whatever loss the netbook troubles lead to.