CCID Consulting believes that with the upgraded position of Chinese industries, the Chinese notebook market will become an essential market exerting a fundamental impact on the world market. Multinational corporations are making more investments in R&D and production in China, while Chinese enterprises continue to strengthen development of core technologies. Thus the position of the Chinese market in the world notebook market will convert from the former mere OEM and brand operation to evolution and upgrading that will influence the industrial value chain of the whole world, with breakthroughs in technological R&D and innovation, logistics, services and so on.
In the meantime, chip manufacturers had a significant impact on the competitive pattern of the notebook market. CPU manufacturers, such as Intel, AMD, VIA and Loongson play a very important role in the industrial chain. It will be their competition that will directly influence the development of the Chinese notebook industry in the next few years, and their technological development and support for collaborators and partners that will influence the development of brand product manufacturers.
Brands and channels will become the summit of industrial competition. Product homogeneity led to manufacturer reliance on brands and channels for successful competition. Brand potential, user loyalty to brands and service systems that back up the brands all become the key to corporate development, whereas the regional and urban level of channel expansion becomes the lifeline for further market development. Launching personalized products that cater to individual customer needs has turned out to be the core competitive area of an enterprise.
CCID Consulting predicts, on the basis of market conditions, that China's notebook industry will continue to grow at a high speed in the next few years, with a compound growth rate of up to 16.9%.
More demands come from households and SMBs. The household market will continue to grow at a high speed in the next few years, whereas though the SMB market is very big, disperse regions and demands entail channel supply capacities and efficiency. As subdivisions of market demands are becoming clearer and clearer, manufacturers have to grow to understand the demands, launch differential products and develop sales channels, guided by strategies that target at specific demands.
Wide-screen products demonstrate an obvious market advantage and promising prospects. Due to the obvious benefits in appearance, cost and entertainment functions, wide-screen computers can bring about win-win situations for both the manufacturer and the customer. As a result, mid- and low-end products on the market are tending towards wide screens, while high-end entertainment computers are also gradually becoming wide screen. The following graph shows market share (based on sales volumes) of the wide-screen market in recent years as well as predictions for the next year.
Flash memory has shown increased popularity for low-capacity products. Flash memory has several advantages over other forms of memory in terms of anti-seismic features, power consumption, reliability and high-speed data transfer. Combined, these features help to reduce the overall size, weight and general power consumption of the notebook itself. Currently, however, high cost restricts the popularization of high-capacity flash memory hard disks. CCID Consulting predicts that in the next few years relatively low-capacity notebooks with flash memory installed will become more popular.
3C shopping malls need to have better models of cooperation. As they currently stand, conventional home appliance malls are not well received by IT manufacturers, due to entry fees, staffing, payment terms and so on. At the same time, however, IT malls have doing very well, particularly in East China, Hisap, Cyber and so forth. As IT malls are getting bigger and overseas home appliance malls are entering China, home appliance malls and manufacturers will no doubt develop better models of cooperation, or remain at a disadvantage.
It is important to build a trustworthy environment for the operation for notebooks themselves. As an increasing amount of secret or sensitive information is stored in notebooks, security has become a new challenge. Consequently, hardware and software development focusing on security will become significant for the future market.
