CCID Consulting recently released a report on the coexistence of simplified notebook PCs and high configuration notebook PCs in China's notebook market. From January to October 2007, the development of the consumer market was still powerful, and the sales of Notebook PCs maintained a high-speed growth. The market competition was more intense, showing in price reductions and product differentiation.

Led by Lenovo, mainstream brands lowered the bottom price to 3,999 Yuan.

Aiming at niche user demands, various brands introduced many personalized and differentiated products, including 13.3-inch products, showing that these differentiation markets grew fast in 2007.

Channels have become the main method for vendors to enlarge their sales volume. Dell, which regarded direct selling as the major distribution manner, began to cooperate with 3C shopping malls.

At the end of 2007, low-end terminal products represented by OLPC and Asus EeePC were introduced to consumers. This indicates that the year 2008 will be an uncommon year for the development of the Notebook PC.

According to statistics from CCID Consulting, from January to October 2007, the sales volume of Notebook PCs was 4.755 million, a year-on-year growth of 44.2% over last year. The sales volume of Notebook PCs in 2007 is looking like it will reach 6.155 million.

The continuous upgrade of technology and the differentiation application demands will push forward the development of the high-end market. Dual core/quad core CPUs, long endurance battery, wireless technology, safety technology, HD LCD and other technologies will continue developing in 2008. Notebook PCs with higher configurations will become the key factors for vendors to make profit.

High-end products will be embodied in not only high configurations, but also the change of appearance, selection of materials, humanized design and differentiation application so as to meet the differentiation demands of users.

The low-end consumer market demand will be high, and simplified Notebook PCs will become the major product. In China, the demand quantity of the medium end and low-end market is rather high. Concerning the design of Notebook PCs, vendors have begun to gradually diminish the size of Notebook PCs, and they have adopted external hard drives, CD drivers and other parts, or even canceled these parts for greater space. The market capacity for simplified Notebook PC is expected to greatly increase.

Resources are dominating the market pattern, and brand distribution is expected to be more concentrated. In the market, the more intense the competition is, the more obvious will be the Matthew effect. For vendors with upstream resources, their advantages in such aspects as design, price, channel, and marketing are obvious, and the brand concentration degree is more apparent.

Retail terminals are quite popular, and vendors will increase the investment in 3C shopping malls. With the high-speed growth of consumer market demand, vendors will put their emphases on retail terminals. As the influence of household appliances on 3C shopping malls is huge, more vendors are expected to enhance their investment in 3C shopping malls in 2008.

Competition in differentiation marketing has never been more intense, and the definition of Notebook PCs has become even fuzzier. From OLPCs, student PCs, EeePCs, UMPCs, CCID Consulting sees that there are more and more differentiation products in the Notebook PC market. All of these products are somehow different from traditional Notebook PCs, and some products even integrate with such consumer electronic products as Palm OS and so on. In the future, the definition of Notebook PCs will be much fuzzier.

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