14 DAY TRIAL // As the various segments of the IT market gain and lose prominence, companies seek to boost their sales, of course, and Samsung is among those with the more ambitious plans, intending to boost its notebook sales by much more than half of what they were last year.
The notebook situation for the year 2010 was well summarized by IDC not long ago.
Samsung was ranked eighth place, with about 6.99 million notebooks sold in total, meaning it failed to match Apple, ranked seventh (obviously), by just 150,000 units.
Meanwhile, ASUS secured sixth spot with 16-17 million, and has set for itself a fairly ambitious plan of 22 million for 2011.
However, Apple and Samsung are both proving more driven than one may have expected, and ASUS may end up having a hard time meeting its goals.
For instance, Samsung only entered the top ten in 2009, when it got tenth place in the first quarter, meaning that it grew quite quickly since then.
That said, Samsung hopes to boost its notebook shipments by over 60% this year alone, which should easily put it ahead of Apple and even start breathing down ASUS' neck, so to speak.
Considering that both Intel and Advanced Micro Devices just delivered new sets of mobile processors, the overall notebook market itself is set to grow.
While riding the segment's momentum, Samsung will just have to make sure its marketing strategy and product portfolio are good enough to get it going faster than its competitors.
Apple may also end up having a greater success on the tablet front than on the notebook segment, so its own rate of growth may very well not match that of the runner up.
Nevertheless, as always, only time will tell if any of this comes to pass. A jump in sales of over 60% is nothing to frown upon and will, of course, take some work.