Taiwan’s tablet shipments are forecast to grow 24.5 percent to 1.2 million units this year, following the launches of more budget tablets and next-generation Windows 8 products later this year, the Market Intelligence & Consulting Institute (MIC, 產業情報研究所) said yesterday.
“We forecast increased shipments of lower-priced tablets will stimulate demand in the tablet market in the short term,” MIC industry consultant Charles Chou (周士雄) told a press conference.
In addition, local makers are expected to roll out more small, budget tablets during the second half of the year, after sales of products such as Acer Inc’s (宏碁) Iconia B1 received a better-than-expected market response, MIC said.
Companies may launch more such products before Apple Inc starts shipping its new iPads in the fourth quarter, MIC said.
However, Chou warned that selling budget tablets will only stimulate short-term sales and will not help much in the long run.
“The effect may weaken in the long run with the penetration rate of the product growing,” he said.
Even so, driven by the strong demand for budget tablets, which are more acceptable to emerging markets, worldwide tablet shipments this year are forecast to grow 62.2 percent to 228 million units from 140 million last year, MIC said.
However, the robust growth in tablets has hastened the decline in notebook shipments this year. Based on the institute’s forecast, worldwide notebook shipments will contract by 4.1 percent to 306 million units this year from 319 million last year.
The sluggish global economy also poses a major uncertainty for the PC market this year, he said.
Chou said total PC shipments from Taiwan are likely to drop 9.9 percent to 154 million units this year from 170 million units last year, reflecting decreasing purchases by Western consumers.
The institute also forecast that server shipments from Taiwan would growth by 4.16 percent to 5 million units this year from 4.8 million units last year, while worldwide server shipments would increase 3.52 percent to 8.8 million units this year from 8.5 million units last year.
Increasing demand for servers worldwide come from telecom, financial and manufacturing companies, as well as government agencies, because they need larger data storage space to process the ever-growing amounts of online data, MIC said.
In a May 16 report, Digitimes Research said worldwide tablet shipments this year will grow by an annual 63.9 percent to 254 million units. That would comprise 73 million iPads, 82.4 million non-iPad models from brand companies and 98.6 million “white box” tablets — those without a registered brand name, Digitimes said.
Additional reporting by CNA
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