Asus: We’ll ship 5 million Eee PCs this year

Sure, Asus may have shipped just 350,000 Eee PC units last year, but Asus president Jerry Shen says he’s confident the company will ship 5 million Eee PCs this year. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Asus is slapping the Eee PC name on every product it releases, from desktop computers to television sets. But I’m under the impression that he’s still talking about laptops.

Shen says he expects the market for low cost ultraportable computers to hit 10 million this year, which means he thinks Asus will be able to sell 50% of all the netbooks shipped in 2008. While that might sound a bit unrealistic, consider the fact that Asus has had the market practically all to itself for much of 2008. While HP’s Mini-Note has been available for a few months, Acer and MSI are just getting ready to release their Eee PC-competitors, and Dell hasn’t officially announced its entry into the marketplace yet.

My guess is that Asus might actually be able to claim 50% or more of the market… this year. 2009 might be another story altogether.


Posted on Thursday, June 12th, 2008, 9:17 am by Brad Linder
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  • I'd *love* to help them with their goal as soon as they offer the 901 for sale in the U.S. This stimulus rebate check is burning a hole in my pocket. :-)
  • You forget they have one key thing they didn't have last year: XP.

    He's already said he expects to sell more XPed ones than Linuxed ones.
  • Rob
    I can't see how they'll sell 500 let alone 5 million - Asus don't seem to be supplying them to any distributors in any great numbers, nor giving them any indication when they'll arrive. I've had an order for an Eee PC 900 which was made 3 weeks before it came out and still hasn't arrived yet as I'm told there are stock shortages. My online distributor is complaining as they're not fulfilling orders - bad for their reputation so won't be selling them any more. Fantastic machine but I'm cancelling if I don't get mine by next week and buying an MSI Wind, I brought an Asus for Easter not Christmas. I dread to think if ever got hold of one and it needed to go back how long it would take them to fix it. There isn't even an Asus Eee PC 901 release date being published either; they should just stick to making value laptops - not TV sets and Wiimote-alike controllers. Has Asus got too big for its boots already?
  • Eric Van haesendonck
    As someone said below, Asus first has to be able to put machines in stores and on websites. Here in Europe there is a big shortage of the Linux versions of the machines. The only Brick and mortar shop that had the 701Linux sold out almost immediately, only the Windows version remains but these don't seems to sell as well as the Linux ones (in the shop there were more peoples looking at the Linux one with the special interface).

    As far as the 900 is concerned only the XP version is availlable in France and I could only find it online. From the comments on the product page I suspect a lot of peoples are waiting for the 20 GB Linux version (for which Asus France doesn't have a date yet)!

    If Asus can't get the very popular Linux versions in the hand of customers before the Aspire one arrives (also with an easy inteface), they'll lose a lot of sales.
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