33M Netbooks To Ship: DisplaySearch

By Doug Olenick On Jul 20 2009 - 6:00am

DisplaySearch is estimating that 32.7 million netbooks will ship worldwide in 2009, with the majority going into the European/Middle East/Asian (EMEA) and North American markets.

If the 32.7 million figure is attained, the netbook, or mini-notebook, market will have effectively doubled in the course of just one year, said John Jacobs, DisplaySearch's notebook market research director.

The company's projections have 13.3 million netbooks shipping to the EMEA market, almost double the 2008 number, and 8.8 into the North American market this year. About 3.7 million shipped last year in North America. Boosting consumer adoption in these two regions are the subsidized programs being instituted by the local cellular carriers, the report stated.

Despite the huge leaps in netbook adoption, DisplaySearch's data indicates the shipment increases are not damaging sales of conventional notebooks.

“While these devices have certainly created a new market, our research indicates that they are predominantly used as secondary PCs by consumers, and are not replacing notebooks,” Jacobs said.

DisplaySearch expects 129.5 million notebooks to ship worldwide, essentially flat from the prior year. North America and the EMEA markets will suffer notebook shipment decreases this year, Jacobs said, primarily due to a tremendous drop in enterprise notebook purchases. Most corporations cut IT hardware spending in response to the worldwide recession, a situation that DisplaySearch does not expect to change until sometime in 2010.

Mini-Note and Notebook Shipments and Growth by Region