By Martin Vedris
SYDNEY: That was a key message from Toshiba’s general manager Information Systems Division (ISD), Mark Whittard at Toshiba’s media launch of its new range of 21 notebooks for business and consumers yesterday.
“Notebooks outship desktops, the desktop PC is dead, I’ve been saying it for 10 years,” Whittard said.
“In Australia now we ship four notebooks every ‘business minute’,” he said, referring to a calculation of a business year, not including weekends and public holidays.
Global sales of notebooks are booming according to Gartner’s report, Global PC Forecast and Shipments Quarterly Statistics, June 2008. The Gartner research suggests that global notebook sales are projected to represent over half of the global PC shipment volume by 2009.
And a report called the IDC EMEA, Quarterly PC Tracker for Q3 2007 showed that notebook sales in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), exceeded desktop PC sales for the first time during the third quarter of 2007.
Whittard referred to global sales of Toshiba’s notebooks for FY07 being just under 10.5 million units and worth $A10 billion to the company. He said the unit sales volume placed it third in the PC market, and that the revenue generated is a significant portion of the Toshiba’s $AUD73 billion turnover.
Tohsiba also reported that its ISD sales in the Australian market are “approaching $500 million per annum” and that since 1985, Toshiba ISD has sold more than 1.75 million notebooks in Australia and New Zealand.