Some info on the Taiwan notebook computer producers.
From the Yahoo ULBI thread... Unfortunately the source of the numbers aren't revealed, but the estimates are consistent with an estimated 10-12M notebook units per year.
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I'm interested in the growth of the notebook computer sector. As my previous post on the Japanese market pointed out, the growth of notebook computer sector is surprising a lot of forecasters. I estimate the world-wide market for all computers will be about 60M units this year, based on microprocessor unit sales (corrected for workstation and server volumes). If over the long term, notebooks eventually hit 30% of this market, that is equivalent of 18M units per year. A 40% penetration would be 24M per year. And of course, world-wide computer unit sales should grow in excess of 10% per year. Put these number together, and in five years, we should see about 100M total computer unit sales, resulting in 30-40M notebook computer sales. This would be annual growth rates for notebook computers of 25-32% respectively.
Furthermore the drop in prices of flat panel displays, MPUs, and memory, seems to be driving the prices of notebooks toward sub-zero territory (computers retailing for less than $1000). If this happens, the market for notebook computers could explode. Imagine every college student buying a notebook computer. Imagine most businesspeople, engineers, sales and marketing, etc with notebook computers. Also it appears that the market segment that notebooks capture is greater in overseas markets than it is in the US market. These foreign markets will be where the growth rate in PCs sold will be the highest over the next five years.
I suspect that some of the major computer makers understand these trends much better than us, and probably have shared some of their unit growth forecasts with Valence management. Perhaps this is the reason why management seemed less concerned with the size of the notebook market than I have been. They have seemed to imply that the market is much larger than their projected production rates. I could never quite reach the same conclusion, but these recent articles have opened my eyes a bit as to the potential market for notebook computer batteries.
Of course, we still need evidence that they are actually producing the cells. I suspect the next several months are going to be very interesting.
Paul |
