14 DAY TRIAL // MSI, one of ASUS' direct competitors in the netbook market, has recently announced that it expects its Wind netbook shipments to reach around 300,000-500,000 units in 2008. If the company succeeds in reaching this target, it will be closer to achieving yet another mark, which will take the company's total notebook shipments to the two million units figure.
Obviously, MSI has more realistic hopes - if compared to ASUS, which estimates it will sell no less than 5 million Eee PC by the end of the year. According to Jerry Shen, ASUS' CEO, the Taiwanese manufacturer thinks that the netbook market will count 10 million units, of which 50 percent will be represented exclusively by Eee PCs. With all that, even considering that ASUS is one of the biggest manufacturers of portable computers, the 5 million figure of Eee PCs sold by the end of 2008 might just be a bit on the wishful-thinking side.
MSI's chairman, Joseph Hsu, hopes that his company will ship at least 300,000 units in 2008, although he has also stated that he is not counting on that the shortage of Intel Atom processors will be solved until September. However, because both MSI Wind and ASUS Eee PC rely on the Atom CPU for computing power, both chairmen's estimations might not become reality if Intel fails to supply them with the necessary number of Atom processors.
Hsu noted that, last year, MSI shipped 1.1 million notebooks. The company didn't succeed in topping that figure because of fierce competition on the European and the US markets. This is why, for 2008, MSI will focus on emerging markets, including Eastern Europe, Central and South America, China and India. MSI is also hoping to enter the list of top-ten notebook brands in 2009, with a total shipments figure of 4.5 million units.
Since MSI is also among the leading manufacturers of motherboards, Hsu commented on market speculation of possible price cuts in the motherboard market in the second half of this year. According to him, MSI will not engage in a price war.