While economic conditions in the US continue to remain sour, sales of notebooks on a global level enjoyed a solid first quarter. And, the prospects for LED backlight units (BLUs) in these notebooks are on the rise, too. Can these products dodge the recession?

Chris Chinnock
Senior Analyst and Editor
for Insight Media

While Q1 notebooks sales are always the weakest quarter, there are indicators 2008 will be a banner year. For example, a few weeks ago Intel released healthy Q1 results. It said that notebook growth has been so strong, and desktop growth so weak, that CEO Otellini now expects the notebook/desktop crossover to happen this year. Notebook shipments weren’t expected to make up the majority of PC shipments until 2009, but Intel thinks that strong growth combined with interest in low-cost "Netbooks" could make that milestone happen this year.

And in Taiwan, where many of these notebooks are produced by OEMs, around 26 million notebooks were shipped by Taiwan-based makers in Q1′08, a sequential drop of 8%, but an on-year increase of 41%, according to Digitimes Research. The four top producers, Quanta Computer, Compal Electronics, Wistron and Inventec, combined to make 21.4M units.

At the brand level, IDC data showed that global notebook shipments topped 31.57 million units in the first quarter, with Hewlett-Packard (HP) taking a 21.7% share of the market, followed by Acer with 15.8%, Dell with a 14.9%, Toshiba with a 9.7% and Lenovo with 7.2%. Dell shipped 3.1 million business notebooks in the first quarter, making the company the No. 1 vendor in the business notebook segment, according to IDC.

So how many of these are using LED backlights? An increasing number. According to results just published in Insight Media’s LCD Backlight report, we expect a total of 121 million notebooks to be shipped in 2008 and of these, about 13% or nearly 16 million will have LED BLUs. As shown in the table, the most popular size is the 15.4" panel and nearly 8 million of the nearly 60 million that will ship will have LED BLUs. By 2012, we expect over 60% of notebooks will have LED BLUs.

According to a recent report in Digitimes, this forecast has been backed-up by major BLU producers. For example, manufacturers plan to ship the following: Coretronic 2.5 million BLUs in 2008; Radiant 3.5 million; Kenmos 1.5 million; and Nano-Op 2 million. Digitimes reports that LED penetration will reach 20% of the notebook market by the end of the year. That’s probably about right as production increases, and is in line with our 13% overall projected penetration for the entire year.

So, despite difficult economic times, the prospects for notebooks in general and notebooks with LED backlights in particular, looks quite promising. Let’s hope the good times continue to roll and the economy doesn’t take another turn for the worse.