ASUS: Tablets grow strong notebooks difficult to accomplish goals

For Asustek, this year is a matter of good news: The growth of the tablet PC market is very strong, but it is very likely that the notebook PC market will not be able to complete the planned shipment of 20 million units in 2011. According to market watchers, Asus laptops may have only 18,500 to 190 million units shipped throughout the year.

Kevin Lin, vice president of Asustek’s sales division, pointed out that the company’s Eee Pad Transformer tablet has maintained a rapid growth in sales since its launch, with an average monthly shipment of 10,000 units in Taiwan. Asustek also plans to launch two new 10.1-inch Eee PCs with Intel in late July: The X101H is equipped with a Windows 7 Starter operating system and a 250GB hard drive, priced at NT$9,000 (approximately RMB 2,000); another X101 uses MeeGo. The operating system, with an 8GB SSD, is priced at TWD 7000 (approximately RMB 1,550).

Facing the big sale of the Eee Pad Transformer, Asustek decided to launch the 3G version of the product while launching the Eee Pad Slider, a sliding version of the keyboard, to prepare for the Android 3.2 update in the future. Asustek has shipped more than 400,000 tablet PCs in the first half of 2011, and it seems that there are no problems with the two million targets set before the completion.

In 2011, Taiwan’s local tablet market was about 500,000 units. Among them, Apple's iPad accounted for 53% of the market share, and the remaining 47% were divided by the Android products of each brand. Asustek’s market share in the Android tablet exceeds 40%, and its shipments in Taiwan reach 8-9,000 units. Acer and HTC are ranked second and third behind. However, in the mainland and Hong Kong and Macau markets, the gap between the Android tablet and the iPad is huge, with more than 70% of the iPad occupied. It now appears that the growth of Android tablets in the Asia-Pacific region is expected to be in Southeast Asia such as the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia and Other places. In the local market, tablet computers are not yet the mainstream, and shipments of related products are expected to increase significantly in the fourth quarter.