HP aims to ship 11 million notebooks in 2004

Hewlett-Packard (HP) now expects to sell 11 million notebooks in 2004, a 10% jump from its earlier target of 10 million and an increase of close to 70% from the 6.5 million it shipped in 2003, according to sources at HP's contract makers in Taiwan. HP's revised target for 2004 is achievable after the company managed to push up its notebook sales to 6.5 million units in 2003 from 3.8 million in 2002, the sources quoted data released by International Data Corporation (IDC) as saying. Two Taiwanese notebook makers – Compal Electronics and Inventec – will play a key role in HP's thrust to push its notebook sales up this year, said the sources.

Compal, which manufactures consumer-use models for HP, is expected to ship between three and four million notebooks, including models with AMD's Athlon 64 processors, to the US vendor this year. Inventec, which handles the production of business-use models, is expected to deliver 2.5 to three million units to HP in 2004, according to the sources. Quanta Computer, the world's largest notebook maker, is also a major contract maker for HP, expecting to ship more than one million notebooks to HP in 2004, said the sources. Quanta however will make around four million notebooks for Dell this year, the sources added. Wistron became a new contract partner for HP this year and is expected to begin volume shipments to the US vendor in the third quarter, said the sources.

View: The full story