If netbooks are following the traditional product cycle, they must be nearing the peak in Europe this week as two major budget supermarket chains push out the devices to their mainstream customer base. Aldi, the supermarket chain that sold 10′s of thousands of Medion Akoya Minis in the summer, is about to push the device out through its 300 UK shops. Expect at least 6 pieces per store for something like 2000 sales on the 7th of September. Then, in Germany, watch out for Plus who, with their 2700 shops started offering the Zen-ID (like the Akoya Mini, the same as the MSI Wind.) At an average of 6 per shop, that’s another 16000+. Add on the discount electrical stores and office stores and you’re at well over 20000, in just a few weeks, in Germany. Lets have some fun with these figures now and play Gartner because I think we’ve got enough data points to start estimating global netbook sales. [Article continues below...]

We’ll start with the above figures and call it 30000 netbooks sold in one month in Germany and lets say that its been happening since the first supermarket offering in July. That’s about 100,000 netbooks sold in three months which I have no doubt will extend to 400000 in 12 months. Due to competition, price reductions, marketing and new features, I even feel confident to say 0.5 Million in 1 year. A penetration rate in Germany of about 0.75%

For fun, lets multiply that across Europe with the UK, France, Holland, Italy and Spain collectively being about 3 times the size of Germany and having a similar customer base. That’s another 1.5 million sales in 12 months. The rest of Europe is not so small either, a total of over 700 million people [the EU totals 500 million. Europe itself is about 700 million] I wouldn’t expect the penetration to be the same in the rest of Europe but if we take an average of 0.3 times the German netbook penetration rate, we reach a grand total of:

Europe: 2.7 million netbook sales.
(12 months from July 2008)

That’s an average Europe-wide penetration rate of 0.38 of one percent. One in every 260 people across a mixed, but relatively rich, demographic.

Lets assume the same penetration rate in the top non-European, but relatively rich countries I see on my Google analytics results for UMPCPortal. U.S., Canada, Australia, Hong Kong, Japan. Their total population is about 500 million.

• US, CN, AU, HK, JP = 500 Million people @ 0.0038 = 1.9 million sales

Other top countries that need to be considered are: China, Taiwan, Singapore and Indonesia which have much less buying power on average. Lets say 0.1 times the average European rate. One in 2600 people.

• CN, TW, SN, ID = 1500 Million people @ 0.00038 = 0.57 million

That’s 5.2 million sales across 2.7 billion people. We now need to add in the other people that live here with us. India and Africa and a bunch of smaller countries where I’d estimate the penetration rate to be somewhat less than in China. Again, lets say 0.1 of the penetration rate of China. 0.000038 (one sale per 26,000 people)

3900 million @ 0.000038 = 0.15 million sales.

Go to next page…

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