Linux Carried Along on Netbooks Wave

According to IDC, the number of computers sold grew 27% from the previous year. Around half of them consisted of the mini-notebooks known as netbooks. In the third quarter of 2008 around 2,000,000 netbooks in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) found their way out of warehouses. The draw of these devices is not supposed to let up despite the current world economic crisis, at least in the number of units sold, even if price competition and monetary exchange rates make the predictions less optimistic. The Linux contingency of these netbooks is considerable and helps propel it further into the world market.

PC vendor Acer leads total sales in the EMEA market in the third quarter with 21% and has thus surpassed HP, the leader as recently as the last quarter of 2007. Noteworthy is that the Korean company, with its Aspire One, has moved from second place within three quarters, according to analysts. Third place goes to Dell, which lost a few percentages, and Asus pushed its way to fourth place from the previous fifth with a current 3.7%. HP has meanwhile moved out of the top four.

Acer and Asus thus have the lion's share of netbooks between them, at 80% according to IDC.

Much of the success lies in their cooperative involvement with the telecom market. Their primary business, however, is still individual sales. Asus was ahead in the first half of the year, but Acer accelerated by mid-year into first place. The reason for their successes: optics and price. It could be that sales might heat up in the pre-Holiday period to move beyond the $4,000,000 mark, as predicted by Eszter Morvay, responsible at IDC for PC sales in the EMEA market.

Morvay revealed to Linux Magazine Online that there were no specific figures for Linux netbook sales, but that it lay somewhere in the 40th percentile. Even though this figure seems a little high, it is known that many of the world's netbooks have Linux on board since their first inception 18 months ago.

For example, notebooks with Linux make up about 5.5% of the notebook market in Germany, according to a study. Compared to January 2007 this constitutes not only a 500% increase, but the increase was primarily due to the appearance of the Eee PC from Asus, the first real world-conscious product after the OLPC notebook and Classmate PC from Intel (see the One Laptop per Child project). Since then new netbooks with or without Linux have begun popping up.

IDC market researchers are distributed among a dozen worldwide offices, with the office in Framingham, Massachusetts at their center. The PC Tracker service for EMEA is located in Britain.