Worldwide notebook shipments are expected to drop 7.3% on year to below 150 million units in 2016 as Windows 10's new anniversary update is not attractive enough to prompt a lot users to purchase new PCs and Intel's Kaby Lake-based processors only had a small upgrade from the previous-generation models and were delayed in shipments plus emerging markets are seeing weakening demand.
In the second half of the year, US-based vendors will perform better than the rest of the first-tier brand vendors. Hewlett-Packard (HP) will become more aggressive on price competition in the second half with complete product lines and will surpass Lenovo to become the largest in the third quarter by a small shipment gap, according to Digitimes Research's latest notebook report.
Dell, which mainly focuses on the enterprise sector, will see growing shipments in both the third and fourth quarters, but the growth scale will not be as strong as those of competitors that mainly target the consumer sector.
Apple had an unsatisfactory shipment performance in the first half of the year, but its notebook shipments in the second half will grow over 40% from the first with upgrades in mid-range and high-end MacBook products.
Lenovo, which has been suffering from channel inventory pileups, will not be able to see its shipments rise strongly until the fourth quarter. As for Taiwan-based vendors, Acer will have a better performance in the second half due to its weak first-half shipments.
As for ODMs, Quanta Computer's shipments will account for almost 40% of Taiwan's overall shipments in the second half of the year. Compal will see its shipment proportion drop sequentially in the second half of the year, as its orders from Dell are weakening plus Lenovo has been increasing its in-house production rate and relatively reducing its orders to Compal.
Wistron will see increasing orders from HP and new orders from Xiaomi.
This article is an excerpt from a Digitimes Research Quarterly Data Report (Taiwan notebooks - 2Q 2016). Visit our latest Data reports.
This article is an excerpt from a Digitimes Research Special Report (Taiwan notebooks - 2Q 2016). Visit our latest Special reports.