Notebook Shipments Suffer Over 10% Drop In December – Digitimes Research

While the tablet market (and particularly Amazon.com’s Kindle Fire) had a banner 2013 Christmas holiday season, Digitimes Research’s Joanne Chien reports that the global top-five notebook brand vendors and top-three ODMs, after enjoying on-month shipment growths in November, suffered sharp on-month drops of 12% and 11% in December, respectively, which was actually better than Digitimes Research’s original expectations, due to extended orders from both the enterprise and consumer markets, and orders that shifted forward for production in December because of the Lunar New Year holiday season in the Orient.

Among first-tier brand vendors, Ms. Chein reports that Toshiba and Dell had better performances than the rest in December, with Toshiba even enjoying a shipment growth higher than that of November. Drilling down to specifics, Digitimes Research determined that Dell’s shipment growth was mainly attributable to the replacement trend created by Microsoft ending support for Windows XP, and the recovery of enterprise notebook demand in the US and Europe,.

Meanwhile, education notebook orders from India and year-end holiday sales helped Hewlett-Packard (HP) achieve an on-month decline of “only” 15 percent for December, allowing the company to maintain its notebook shipments at above eight million units in fourth quarter 2013.

As for the ODMs, Quanta Computer and Inventec, the major suppliers of HP notebook hardware, both saw greater than 10% on-month shipment drops in December, while the other ODMs only suffered single-digit percentage decreases.

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