Wal-Mart May Offer Branded Notebook PCs

Taiwan's China Economic News Service (CENS) and the analyst firm ARS, quoting industry sources, said on Thursday that Wal-Mart is being courted by several Taiwan-based notebook PC makers, including Arima Computer, Quanta Computer, Compal Electronics, and Wistron, to provide product for the new line.

Wal-Mart is expected to place one or two test orders in the first quarter of next year, CENS said. Arima will get an order for more than 100,000 units, according to that organization. Arima had built notebook PCs for Hewlett-Packard but that relationship ended early this year, CENS said.

Of the other three vendors, Quanta and Compal are the world's largest portable PC vendors, while Wistron was spun off from Taiwan-based Acer in mid-2001.

In a research note, Sam Bhavnani, mobile computing analyst at ARS, he expects Wal-Mart to enter the market with a sub-$800 model targeting value-conscious users to the detriment of such suppliers as Dell, HP and Toshiba. Wal-Mart is currently testing the notebook space with HP-branded units, he said. However, he noted, Wal-Mart will probably not enter the high-end consumer or the corporate space.

Bhavnani said that, based on Arima's current products, Wal-Mart could be considering three possible configurations, all of which include a 15-inch LCD panel, a 40-Gbyte hard drive, a DVD/CD-RW drive and Windows XP.

One configuration, based on the Celeron 2.5GHz processor with 256 Mbytes of RAM, could be priced at $699. The second, based on the Athlon XP 2000 processor and 256 Mbytes RAM, could be priced at $749. Wal-Mart could also offer a Pentium 4 model with 2.6GHz processor and 512 Mbytes RAM for $899, Bhavnani said.