IDC will release figures last week that indicate that the Netbook phenomenon may have peaked. The figures from market researcher IDC show a decline in Atom processor shipments as a percentage of Intel mobile processors a sharp reversal of previous trends that had the Atom chip, quarter by quarter, taking a larger percentage of mobile chip shipments.
“Atom in Netbooks is plateauing,” Shane Rau, an analyst at IDC, said in a phone interview. “With the market recovery, I think end users are going to be looking for more value than just low-cost devices. This is an opportunity for higher-end mobile PCs, for example, that have better performance, bigger screens, bigger hard drives,” he said.
In the first quarter of this year, Atom processors as a percentage of Intel mobile processors fell to 20.3 percent, compared with 24.3 percent in the fourth quarter of last year and 23.5 percent in the third quarter.
And Intel doesn’t seem to disagree. In an Intel earnings conference call earlier this month, CEO Paul Otellini said this: “I think we suggested that Netbooks seem to be settling out at about 20 percent of the mobile form factors and on an annual basis that looks to be about right,” he said.
So does all this mean the end to netbooks? No, quite the opposite, because it is really only confirms the fact that netbooks have established stable and makes up 20% of the “Mobile Computing” sales. Otellini even says that netbooks are “settling out at about 20%” 1/5th of mobile computing sales isn’t too shabby in my books.
Via NetbookNews.de
