The top-5 notebook brand vendors saw their combined shipments drop 32% on month and the top-3 ODMs together saw a decline of 25% in July due to increased channel inventory pileup, weakening demand for Chromebooks because of the slow season, vendors' conservative shipments prior to the release of new Wintel products, and the fact that some vendors started aggressive price competition in Europe and North America in May and June, which dramatically increased the vendors' shipments in both months and thus raise the base comparison level.
Lenovo and Hewlett-Packard (HP) both had over 40% on-month declines in July notebook shipments. Because of its high inventory level, Lenovo had higher pressure placing orders and only had shipments slightly higher than HP, according to Digitimes Research's latest notebook figures.
After experiencing six consecutive months of growth, Dell suffered declines both on month and on year in July shipments as demand from the enterprise sector and for Chromebooks turned weak. As for Taiwan-based vendors, Asustek Computer's shipments performed better than those of Acer in the month.
Compared to the top-5 vendors, the top-3 ODMs' combined notebook shipments had a smaller decline in the month since Lenovo, which had a major drop in July shipments, only accounted for a rather small portion of Taiwan's overall shipments, while ODMs' shipments for Apple's new MacBooks also helped slow the decline.
The top-3 ODMs' combined shipments dropped 6% on year in July as Compal Electronics' orders from its China- and US-based clients suffered a significant drop. Wistron had the best performance among the top-3 because of new orders from Xiaomi and the fact its existing clients only slightly reduced their orders for the month.
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