Aaron Lee, Taipei

 

Notebook brand vendors that have not yet released ultrabooks but plan to do so soon, such as Hewlett-Packard (HP), Samsung Electronics and Dell, as well as players that have already launched their ultrabooks such as Acer, Asustek Computer, Lenovo and Toshiba, are all eying CES 2012 as the perfect stage to showcase their devices with the total number of ultrabook models that will appear at the show to reach 30-50, according to sources from upstream supply chain.

The sources pointed out that due to the IT market lacks new machines or topics that can draw consumer's attention in the second half of 2011, ultrabooks are currently playing an important role for boosting demand of consumers.

Since the traditional hard drive supply is facing a shortage because of the floods in Thailand, some vendors are hoping ultrabooks, which mostly are adopting solid state drives (SSD) for storage, will help attract consumers and aid their impact from the hard drive shortage since ultrabooks have good gross margins.

Currently, most of market watchers expect ultrabook to account for 20-30% of total notebook shipments in 2012, with Acer president Jim Wong expecting the segment to account for 25-30% and Intel expecting it to be 40%.