Asustek shipped 700,000 Eee PCs in September this year, says paper
Asustek Computer shipped around 700,000 Eee PCs in September this year, a new monthly high for the company. Total shipments for the third quarter reached around 1.7 million units, and since October and November …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Eee PC has moved from curiosity to volume business in barely a year: after early shipments beat expectations in late 2007, Asustek's September run of roughly 700,000 units marks a new monthly peak, with Q3 totaling around 1.7 million. The product line is also broadening beyond the original clamshell — a 9-inch touchscreen model was in the works earlier in 2008, and Asustek is now extending the Eee brand into motherboards and desktops per its Eee family expansion.
First-order effects
- Asustek's own production and supply chain must scale to the new cadence — Q3's ~1.7 million units plus continued October–November demand puts sustained pressure on component sourcing and assembly for the Eee line.
- Microsoft gains directly: every low-cost Eee PC shipped running Windows strengthens its position in the emerging small, cheap mobile-PC segment it had been ceding to Linux variants.
Second-order effects
- Rivals who dismissed netbooks as a niche — Acer, MSI, and other ODM-adjacent brands — face mounting pressure to field competing low-cost mini-laptops, compressing price points across the entry notebook market.
- Component suppliers (displays, SSDs, low-power CPUs) see demand mix shift toward smaller, cheaper parts, altering their own capacity allocation away from conventional notebook builds.
Third-order effects
- If volumes keep compounding, the netbook segment could structurally split the PC market into two tiers — ultra-cheap secondary devices and full-price notebooks — forcing incumbents to choose which margin pool to defend.
- Sustained success of sub-$400 Windows machines would give Microsoft both an opportunity and a long-term risk: winning the segment locks in OS share but at license prices that erode the traditional PC economics model.
The trend: Netbooks are scaling from experiment to a durable second tier of the PC industry, pulling Microsoft, Intel, and the Taiwan ODM ecosystem into a lower-margin, higher-volume equilibrium.