In a report by Bloomberg the Acer CEO is said to have blamed early Ultrabook and touchscreen investments as a mistake. Acer had problems in 2013 as share value dropped following poor sales results. “We need to dig ourselves out of a hole.” Jason Chen said.
This is a story that will bounce around a bit today.
Read the full story
Look at the Amazon US Best Sellers list and wish list. Laptops are few and far between in this and similar buy/wish/trend lists and it echoes what we see on Ultrabooknews. The market for Ultrabooks has been flat for the last three months. Today I see that PC sales are projected to fall for the first time in a very long time.
Yesterday evening I put together a Vodcast on the topic and spoke about the issues and the Windows 8 opportunity. I’ve included more detail in the article below. Video also embedded below.
iHS, owner of iSuppli seems to find it funny that they’ve had to slash their estimations for Ultrabook sales by 50%. “Dude, You’re Not Getting an Ultrabook” does a great job at getting the media to echo the story but did iHS cock-up or did the market change dramatically in the last few months? We’re a month away from Windows 8, prices have dropped considerably and the Ultrabook looks well-positioned to take a large percentage of the laptop sales market in Q4. Was the back-to-school period disappointing or is the laptop market overall going to suffer in Q4 and take Ultrabooks with it? This is no laughing matter.
What a depressing, and somewhat embarrassing set of news items we’ve seen for Ultrabooks on the Web this week.
You may have noticed that there hasn’t been much interesting Ultrabook news this week and as we hit summer holidays, silly season starts. Stick with Ultrabooknews for a more sensible take on whats’ going on because journalists, no, juniors employed to cover summer holidays are fed with news items and hints and it usually ends up looking cheap.
“Hey, IDG published a report on the PC market. There’s a few mentions of Ultrabooks in it and it looks bad. Send some provocative copy to the editor because page views are down.” Junior writer ends up with pieces that get edited to this, this and this.
Fact 1 – There are no Ultrabook sales numbers available, only best guesses.
Fact 2 – Ultrabook sales started in June – the last month in Q2.
Where does Fact 2 come from? Us. We’ve got more too…
Here we are, a few weeks into availability of a few Ultrabook devices in a few parts of the world and the big news over the last 2 days is that sales are disappointing and orders have been cut back.
Earlier in the week, tech journalists were excited about the growth possibilities following a report from iSuppli.
Is it really sensible to make judgements now?
I looked through Amazon UK, Germany and USA today and to he honest, you’ll have trouble buying an Ultrabook right now. The same is true of most retailers. In the important European market Acer are the only manufacturer that have achieved wide availability to date. In Germany, the largest country in Europe, it’s tough to find a single device. I’m sure Australia, Canada and the big Indian, Taiwan, Japanese and South Korean markets aren’t much better. The point is that Ultrabooks are late. Is it any surprise that numbers are less than expected? Is it any surprise that no-one really has the big picture yet?
There are quite a few sales stats floating around for the tablet market. A recent report from IDC gives us two important checkpoints that, when considered with other stats, point towards a popular 7 inch Android tablet market that could be purely dependent on Galaxy Tab 7 sales unless Honeycomb ramps up quickly.
Firstly though, take a look at these exciting numbers from IDC.
Why are they exciting? These numbers are big enough to build quality software development projects on. I mean serious software development. Word processing. Audio editing. Photo editing and other applications that are generally rather ‘light’ on the ARM-based tablet platforms.
Clearly IOS is moving forward at a fantastic pace and we’re seeing productive software advance very quickly but there’s something in the Android figures that might be worth considering.
If about 350,000 Google experience Android devices were activated on average per day through the period (source) and Honeycomb runs at 1% of all Android versions (source), it means we can derive the following:
Yes, there’s potential for error in those figures as you can’t compare sales with activations for the same period but the important think here is that Android 2.x is most popular on tablets at the moment. When you think carefully about that, you’re effectively saying that the 7 inch tablets are taking the lions share. With the Galaxy Tab sales figures indicating a possible 500,000 sales per month, you have to wonder just how much of those Android tablet sales are just Galaxy Tab sales. Probably most of them. The Android Tablet market lived because of the Galaxy Tab 7.
Why?
It could be the form factor. Many, many people have commented on the portability. It could be the availability. The Galaxy tab has an incredible global distribution. It could be the price. At 350 Euros here, it’s a bargain and way cheaper than the larger, Honeycomb products. Quality is also going to be a factor. There aren’t many bad reviews of the Galaxy Tab out there.
What does that tell us for Q2-Q4?
The Galaxy Tab had good early reviews which is important for setting up great search results for subsequent sales of a product. Global carrier and shelf distribution is important. Price helps a lot. It also means there are few players that can achieve the same figures. Any Honeycomb device will suffer from the lack of tailored apps. Pricing needs to drop quickly. Only global players have a chance. Given the age of the Galaxy Tab and the momentum Samsung have, they look set to dominate again if they bring out a new Galaxy Tab 7 inch
10 inch, Honeycomb devices are in a pickle. Early reviews weren’t fantastic and the numbers of sales are low too which means developers won’t be interested in investing time and money into apps. If Samsung don’t update the Galaxy Tab, will overall Android tablet sales suffer unless another global player comes along with a killer product or will combined sales of new products start to ramp up numbers to solve the applications problem? Or will I write a similar article about Amazon this time next year?
It’s more than just a little annoying that the only thing known about an iPad in Europe is that it is due to launch in ‘late April’ for an ‘unbelievable price.’ That’s the stable Euro/$ for you!
One can assume that a 1:1 dollar to Euro conversion is going to be in the right ball-park though and I’ve even found one retailer already taking pre-orders. 3GStore.de (info via Blogeee) appears to be a big site with a solid history and it’s offering the base iPad for 549 Euro. The high-end model clocks in at 879 Euro. I’m guessing that they’ve thrown 50 Euros onto the estimated retail price and are simply taking a risk by being first. SEO value + increased margin = Smart move!
At 499 Euro inclusive 19% local taxes (543 dollars before tax) it’s not cheap -the same cost as an unlocked HTC Desire. How will this fit with the easy-going EU public?
As we mentioned on the Meet:Mobility podcast this week, we don’t see the penetration being anything like what it is in the U.S. Based on my experience with resellers and affiliate schemes, EU conversions run way way below that what you’ll see in the U.S. I’m estimating about 20% of the penetration seen in the U.S. Assuming Apple sold 500,000 in one week among a population of 300 million in the U.S., I wouldn’t expect anything more than 100,000 sales in the first week across the Euro-zone which has a similar population.
If you’re in the EU, how are you feeling about a 500 Euro price tag?
 |
| |||
 |
| |||
 |
| |||
 |
| |||
 |
| |||
 |
| |||
 |
| |||
 |
| |||
 |
| |||
 |
|