Taiwan’s Notebook Shipments (But Not Apple) Shrink 5.7% In Fourth Quarter 2011 – Digitimes Research

Digitimes Research’s Joanne Chien reports that notebook shipments from Taiwan makers declined 5.7% on the quarter and 4.4% year-over-year in the fourth quarter of 2011, volumes impacted a slumping global economy and shortage in the supply of hard disc drives , according to researchers’ latest findings.

However, the Taiwan OEM fared better than some competitors elsewhere, with global notebook shipments showing an apparent 8.7% decline sequentially to 48.59 million units in the fourth quarter.

Taiwan makers’ relatively favorable showing in the fourth quarter was largely attributable to a switch of orders by Hewlett-Packard (HP) from Flextronics International to Taiwan makers, and a sharp decline in notebook shipments by Samsung Electronics that affected global notebook shipments, says Ms. Chen, who also notes that Apple was the only notebook vendor whose fourth-quarter notebook shipments sustained the pace recorded in the third quarter, and even saw its shipments of MacBook Air models increase to 1.2 million units in Q4 ’11 from one million in the previous quarter. The MacBook Air’s market buoyancy in the face of a sinking market generally was partly due to its exclusive use of solid state storage media, production of which was not seriously disrupted by the flooding in Thailand.

On the other hand, Asustek Computer, affected by the HDD supply shortage, suffered the industry’s sharpest setback of 12.4% in notebook shipments in the fourth quarter, compared to an average of 5-7% for other branded vendors. Lenovo, one of the few brands besides Apple that had been enjoying growth potential recently, was second hardest-hit in Q4.