Notebook computers to drive up HP sales

By siliconindia staff writer   |   Thursday, 09 October 2003, 19:30 IST
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BANGALORE: Multinational IT services vendor, HP, expects the rapid growth of notebook computers to drive its sales. It also expects the small and medium segment, especially auto component makers to be a major buyer of its products going forward. “The notebook segment has grown rapidly. In the next two to three years we expect it to grow at 50% to 60%. We also expect sales to double from 20,000 to 25,000 per quarter in the next two years,” Ravi Swaminathan, vice-president, personal systems group, said on Wednesday. HP is said to have around 33% marketshare in this segment. While corporates were seen as the main buyers of notebooks in the past, the education segment is expected to drive growth going forward. Several top institutions, including the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, provide these devices to students. The price of these machines has also dropped in recent times from around Rs 1 lakh to closer to Rs 60,000. With the right duties, this could go as low as Rs 40,000 he contended. Earlier, Balu Doraisamy, president, HP India Sales, said several SMEs were aggressively adopting technology to enhance the efficiency of their operations. He said HP’s India Configuration Centre (ICC) was capable of assembling around 30,000 units per month. Incidentally, the ICC celebrated the manufacture of its 500,000th machine in Bangalore on Wednesday. HP donated the 500,000th desktop to the Ramakrishna Mission. On the occasion, Karnataka IT and Tourism Minister D B Inamdar reiterated the state’s commitment to the hardware sector. He said the Karnataka government had already formed a hardware taskforce and was in the process of finalising the location for a hardware park in the state. “The next growth area in IT will be hardware,” the minister stressed. (Source: Economic Times)