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Notebooks

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

The first two positions have remained steady for some time now. IBM/Lenovo is the winner and HP is number two. Last year, Dell had wrested the third spot from Toshiba. This year, Toshiba returns the compliments. Acer narrowly missed the Users' Choice Club last time, but just made it this year. 

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Notebooks have been an interesting segment to watch these past two years, with purchases booming and many new brands appearing in the market, but it is the established players who've cornered all the glory in this segment. None of the newer players have been able to break out into the top. Compared to last year, winner IBM/Lenovo has improved its brand loyalty, thus indicating that the change over of name from IBM to Lenovo has had little impact, if any. But then, the notebook brand still remains Thinkpad and the IBM brand is also used as of this writing. Second placed HP-Compaq also saw its index improving from 69 last year to 81 % this year. All brands have recorded better brand loyalties this time around. Coming to brand shifts, IBM/ Lenovo is gaining adherents mostly from Toshiba, followed by HP- Compaq. This is a repetition of the picture last year. Again as a repetition of last years picture, IBM/Lenovo's losses would be to HP-Compaq. For second placed HP- Compaq, gains will be mostly from Dell and Acer owners in that order, and losses will be to IBM/Lenovo. In the market, Acer has been a price warrior with notebooks in the recent past. And that has given the brand rich returns as evidenced by its re entry into the Users' Choice Club. However Acer, having entered the Users Choice Club will have to work hard to maintain that position since there is very few switching possibilities from the established brands to Acer.

Brand

Shift (%) 2003

 However, the price warrior would well end up gaining adherents from the other brands in the market, like Zenith, Connoi, Samsung, etc. Samsung had unleashed a strategy unlike its normal one in the notebooks category. Elsewhere, Samsung used to enter the market with prices below or at the market average. In notebooks, however, it chose to position itself as a premium product. The success of this strategy is not visible at least as far as the Users Choice Club goes. Assemblers as a class are more or less absent from the notebook market, and Intel's attempt to set up something akin to its successful GID model in PCs has so far not been very successful. The notebook market while, and established one, is still very small in the country, and there could still be space for an upstart winner to come up in the years ahead. But a cursory scan of the market does not show up anyone with the pockets or the intent, on the horizon. So, for all practical purposes we may be seeing a repeat of the same picture next year also.

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