Netbook sales jumped by 79% in 2009. How about 2010?

When talking about laptops, it’s pretty obvious the last two years were “dominated” by the small ultra portable devices called netbooks. And while “dominated” is not the perfect world here, considering this category of laptops didn’t even exist 3 years ago and now claims around 20% of the total laptop sales, we can easily consider this segment as “last years’ big thing”.

A recent study from Strategy Analytics  shows that in 2009, vendors sold 30.2 million netbooks, with a wooping 79% increase over the sales figures for 2008 in this niche (that while overall sales volume for the entire laptops category stagnated). US and European markets are still the biggest, but netbooks also became popular in Asian in Africa, thanks to their affordable prices. Top manufacturers are the ones we allready knew, with Acer, Asus, Dell and HP claiming the first positions.

Anyway, while sales figures are huge for this segment, they are not as good as predicted at the middle of 2009 by the same source: 32.7 million  and almost twice more than in 2008.

The segment is also expected to grow quite a lot in 2010, with more and more big names getting involved and with more emerging markets in need for cheap laptops. There are no predictions right now on how much will the segment grow in 2010, but I’m pretty sure it will be a big two figures number (I’d put my 2 cents on something around 20-30 %).

Still, there’s one aspect that could really interfere with the welfare of the netbooks niche: the new touch tablets. While not direct competitors, if these devices will catch up, i’m pretty sure they’ll be able to turn some potential netbook users in their directions.What do you think?

Source: Bussiness Wire (via Liliputing)

Tags: future, netbook sales, touch tablet