PC hardware vendors such as Acer, Asus and Dell may withdraw from the tablet market next year because they cannot compete with Apple, Amazon and Barnes & Noble, suggests the Taiwanese news site Digitimes.
The report – which is based only on "sources from upstream supply chains", who would expect to be seeing orders from those companies by now if they were planning an aggressive push into tablets in 2012 – suggests that the PC vendors cannot see any profit in tablets because they do not have a compelling content offering like the existing trio.
However the sources' veracity is called into question by the same Digitimes report, which notes:
"The sources pointed out that although [Apple] iPad 2 is also seeing strong demand from consumers, sales were lower than those of iPad, indicating that consumers' strong enthusiasm for tablet PCs has already disappeared."
That isn't borne out by iPad sales, which in the two quarters since the launch of the iPad 2 in March 2011 to the end of September have sold more than 20 million, compared to 15 million sold in the four quarters of the first iPad's availability.
With Acer having said that it is committed to higher-margin products than just PCs, and Asus aiming for a quad-core tablet in 2012, it seems more likely that the companies named are delaying some orders until 2012 as they await the arrival of Microsoft's Windows 8, which will also run on tablets.
That looks like it could offer better volumes in the tablet market – though the question still remains of how rival companies offering essentially the same Operating System (OS) will eke out profits.
While Microsoft can be certain of making handsome profits from Windows 8, the same isn't necessarily true for the hardware companies, where even Hewlett-Packard (HP), the world's biggest seller of PCs, makes an average profit of just US$40 (€29.60) on each PC it sells at an average of US$800 (€592).
Windows 8 on tablets may allow tablet companies to raise prices because of the attractions of Microsoft's offerings, especially in apps – but they might find themselves in the same price-war struggle as they have been in the Google Android field, where Samsung has so far dominated sales.
Amazon, notably, uses its own version of Android and its own cloud infrastructure to provide content for the Kindle Fire; none of the other Android tablet makers is able to offer the same, except for Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet.
Source: Guardian
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