Ed Moltzen

The Chart

June 19, 2007

The research firm iSuppli, in an emailed news release, says it is revising and increasing its expectations for PC shipments this year, mentioning that notebooks were flying through the market even faster than forecast:

iSuppli predicts global PC shipments will rise to 264 million units in 2007, up 11.2 percent from 239 million in 2006. The previous forecast envisioned 10.7 percent growth for the year.

"Notebook PC shipments rose to 21.8 million units in the first quarter of 2007, up 23 percent from 17.7 million in the first quarter of 2006," said Matthew Wilkins, principal analyst, compute platforms, for iSuppli.

"First-quarter notebook PC shipments were 3 percent higher than we had previously anticipated. There were concerns that the second-quarter release of Intel Corp.'s new Santa Rosa notebook microprocessor platform might cause buyers to delay purchases originally set for the first quarter. However, Santa Rosa did not have a significant negative effect on first-quarter shipments."

iSuppli expects notebooks to account for almost 40 percent of total 2007 PC market shipments.

Interestingly, Microsoft's Vista operating system, which launched in the first quarter, is mentioned nowhere by iSuppli as any kind of a driving factor in the increase.