Netbook Sales Surge, Leaving Some Companies Behind

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Computer research firm NPD expects netbook sales to rise to 20% of total laptop sales this year. That would put unit sales just shy of 33 million, a increase of 100% over 2008. The regions expected to have the most significant growth are North America and China.

Notebook sales are expected to be flat for the year. The news does not favor Sony and Dell which have been late to the netbook  market and have a relatively small market share.

The most recent IDC data show Taiwan’s Acer has almost a third of the netbooks market followed fairly closely by rival Asustek. Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Lenovo, and Samsung have much more modest pieces of the pie.

The numbers indicate that Apple (AAPL), Dell (DELL), and Sony (SNE) have a problem. Apple does not sell a netbook-equivalent. Sony just entered the market, and Dell has lagged, being late to take advantage of its size as it has been with many other products.

The netbook business may end up being Apple’s Achilles heel. Sony and Dell are already so beaten down that their problems extend well beyond whether they have any strength in the newest part of the PC market.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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