WASHINGTON: Despite recent rebounding shipments of consumer notebooks due to replenishing inventories, global demand is still weak and therefore shipments are likely to significantly drop after the 2015 year-end holidays, especially since the first quarter is the traditional slow season, according to Taiwan-based supply chain makers.
Following a strong shipment performance in September, the sources expect their October revenues to turn weak as their orders for the year-end holidays in 2015 were much weaker than those in previous years.
However, compared to the consumer notebook market, the enterprise one is much more stable in the second half with Dell, Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Lenovo all aggressively looking to maintain their shipment volumes.
For the consumer notebook market, except Apple, which is expected to continue enjoying stable shipment growth in the fourth quarter, most other vendors will perform weaker than expected.
Since Microsoft is offering Windows 10 upgrades to consumers for free, but has not given brand vendors any discounts on related licensing fees, notebook brand vendors are seeing increasing pressure as consumers are not in a hurry to replace their PC products.
The sources believe smartphones and wearable devices will be the main gifts for the year-end holidays, and notebooks, lacking new innovations, are unlikely to attract much in sales except models such as the MacBook, iPad Pro and Microsoft’s Surface series.
