Taipei, Nov.6, 2012 (CENS)--A market research firm IDC's global NB shipments report in the third quarter shows Lenovo Group Ltd. replacing Hewlett-Packard (HP) to become the world's largest NB maker; while Taiwan's Asus Computer Inc. posted the sharpest growth exceeding 10% quarter on quarter (QoQ), mainly due to more than 20% QoQ growths in both the U.S. and Asia Pacific.
Global NB shipments in the third quarter were up 5.2% QoQ to NT$514.25 million units, led by Lenovo, following HP, Acer Inc., Asus, and Dell Inc.
Lenovo has announced repeatedly that the firm will depend on profits gained from its home market in China to tap other markets. In the third quarter, the firm witnessed 35% QoQ shipment growth in Middle East, the second highest growth among rivals, with shipments to West Europe hitting the highest growth of 20% QoQ.
Due to growing NB sales driven by tablet PC "Nexus 7", along with relatively low comparison, Asus' NB shipments in the third quarter reached 5.993 million units, with the highest growth of 10.7% QoQ in the industry. Benefiting from hot-selling Nexus 7 co-developed by Asus and Google, Asus pushed its NB market share in U.S. to 8% and replaced Acer to rank the sixth. In Asia Pacific region, Asus ousted Acer as well to rank second in market share, next only to Lenovo.
Acer's NB shipments in the third quarter were 6.352 million units, becoming the only vendor among top five brands posting a decline with 10.8% QoQ. Despite seeing a growth in shipments, Dell still saw NB market share drop to below 10% due to expansions of Asus and Lenovo. HP, the original NB leader in shipments, stopped the three-month shipment decline, growing 5.5% YoY to 8.072 million units.
Asus saw EPS (earnings per share) reach NT$21.97 (US$0.73) in the third quarter, the highest in Taiwanese stock market. A representative of Asus estimated that the firm would ship more than one million touch-NBs and 2.6 million tablet PCs in the fourth quarter, with NB shipments totaling six million units with 3% growth QoQ.
(by Andrew Wang)
