Despite the rising popularity of tablet computers, Taiwanese PC makers may not enjoy the same large market share and higher margins in this emerging segment as they did in notebooks, Citigroup said yesterday.
The US brokerage’s latest report came as Acer Inc (宏碁), the world’s No. 2 PC maker after Hewlett-Packard Co, was to introduce its first tablets in New York yesterday.
“We believe that the rising adoption of tablet PCs is a rather negative trend for Taiwan PC makers,” Citigroup analyst Kevin Chang (張凱偉) said in the report.
Chang said Apple Inc and more new players in this line of business was the main factor that could negatively affect Taiwanese notebook makers.
“Apple will command a dominant market share in tablet PCs,” Chang said, expecting the US company to continue its dominance in the mainstream and high-end tablet market in the longer term. “And, traditional handset players will also grab some of the tablet PC market.”
Moreover, Apple’s “lower cost structure and aggressive pricing strategy” would force notebook makers to encounter lower margins on tablets than they did on traditional notebooks and netbooks, he said.
Citigroup’s analysis did not go as far as other recent studies conducted by Taiwan’s Digitimes Research or the US’ Gartner that implied the explosion in tablet computers would affect sales of notebooks or netbooks.
Rather, the Citi report concluded that Apple appears to be as formidable in tablets as it was in the MP3 market before, and the tablet PC, though called a “PC,” is actually manufactured under a handset cost structure and subject to the handset supply chain.
It also predicted that HTC Corp (宏達電), the world’s biggest maker of smartphones running on both Microsoft and Google’s operating systems, would be “very conservative” in the tablet market because of the low--margin concern.
Even so, there were still worries in the market of whether the emergence of tablets would eat into the netbook or even the notebook market. Acer chief executive and president Gianfranco Lanci was challenged with this question during an interview with CNBC’s Holiday PC Outlook on Monday.
Asked about his view of which segment is more important — tablets or netbooks — Lanci said Acer had viewed the tablets as “complementary” devices to netbooks.
Tablets are “not in direct competition with netbooks,” Lanci said.
“Netbook is still a very good choice when you think about portability. Tablet is a very good choice if you think about consumption. And, in terms of users’ needs, they are totally different needs,” he said.
Acer was scheduled to introduce “a wide range of tablets” including different sizes and various operating systems at a press event yesterday in New York, he said.
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