Posted on Friday, July 11 2008 @ 0:46 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Shipments of the low-cost Asus Eee PC fell short of expectations. The firm
announced it sold 1.7 million Eee PCs in the first half of this year and that's 300,000 less than its original forecast but Asus is still confident that it will be able to ship 5 million Eee PCs this year. Some analysts blame the shortfall on component the shortage of Intel's Atom processor.
Asustek announced that it shipped 1.7 million of Eee PCs in the first half of 2008, 300,000 less than its original forecast. Some industry watchers explained the shortfall to delayed shipments due to the shortage of Intel Atom processors. Despite the present component shortages and gloomy economy, Asustek still aims to ship five million Eee PCs in 2008, according to company sources.
In other news, Acer believes shipments of its Aspire one notebook are on track to reach 5-7 million units in the second half of 2008:
Acer, however, has not been discouraged by the unexpected dip in the market with Lin noting that the first batch of more than 5,000 Linux-based Aspire ones has completely sold out already. Acer is confident it can ship 15,000 units per day following the launch of a Windows XP version in late July, he said.
Aspire one shipments are expected to reach 5-7 million units in the second half of 2008, Lin said. Lin claimed that Acer was one of the partners that motivated Intel to speed up the development of the Atom CPU, and as Acer is confident about its netbook sales, Intel has already guaranteed a fixed allocation of CPUs to the company.
Lin indicated that netbooks are expected to reach a penetration of 10-15% of total notebook sales, but did not specify a time-frame.