Global notebook shipments (not including detachable 2-in-1 products), are expected to drop 17.5% on year and 5.3% sequentially in the fourth quarter as most notebook vendors already completed their inventory preparation for the year-end holiday sales in the third quarter and are still conservative about overall demand in the fourth quarter, according to the latest Digitimes Research quarterly notebook report.
Taiwan's notebook shipments will see a smaller decline than that of global shipments, thanks to Asustek shipments.
US-based vendors' combined share in global shipments will rise slightly from the previous quarter in the fourth quarter because Dell, which mainly focuses on the enterprise market and Apple, which dominates the consumer high-end segment, only see limited effects from weak sales in the mainstream consumer market.
Hewlett-Packard (HP) has remained conservative about its fourth-quarter shipments, as the company is still processing the split between its consumer and enterprise businesses. Lenovo reportedly is not pulling in orders from the upstream supply chain as aggressively as before in and that could relatively hurt its overall shipment performance and the goal is to remain the largest vendor worldwide.
Taiwan notebook makers' ranking in the fourth quarter will remain the same as the third quarter, but Pegatron will benefit from Asustek's increasing shipments, Digitimes Research figures showed.