Intel upbeat on 2009 consumer laptop market

TAIPEI (Reuters) - The consumer notebook PC market will be in good shape next year, despite a slowing global economy, as it caters to booming demand for models optimized for Internet use, Intel's Asia Pacific chief said on Tuesday.

A week ago, Santa Clara, California-based Intel Corp, the world's biggest computer chip maker, posted the strongest third-quarter revenue in its history, as its profit topped Wall Street targets.

"The consumer notebook will hold up," Navin Shenoy, Intel's general manager in the Asia-Pacific region, told Reuters in an interview on the sidelines of a two-day Intel Development Forum in Taipei.

"The commercial market is less clear but I think the emerging markets and consumer market and notebooks will continue to be very good," said Shenoy, who is in charge of sales and marketing of Intel's products in the region, excluding Japan and China.

He declined to give any projections.

Centrino chips used mainly for portable notebooks marked Intel's entry to the wireless space, and the firm is also capitalizing on a new market for smaller, cheaper notebooks, called netbooks, aimed at emerging markets and buyers who want the flexibility of having more than one computer.

"In a rising market, any product wins but in a slowing market, the best product wins," Shenoy said.

"We will be strong in terms of our product lines."

At the company's forum, Intel displayed a line of netbooks with its Atom chips inside, including models from Dell Inc, Acer Inc and Asustek Computer Inc, whose popular Eee PC is sold between $299-$699.

Intel booked revenue of $10.2 billion in the third quarter, up 8 percent sequentially, with $200 million from sales of lower-priced Atom processors for low-cost PCs.

"Think about this devices going into tier three and tier four cities in the emerging markets, where there was never really a computer before," Shenoy said.

Research firm iSuppli Corp expects the global notebook PC market to grow 20 percent next year to 155 million units, but it expects the netbook segment to grow more than twice as quickly, by 55 percent, to 13.2 million units.

Notebook PC shipments would grow by a quarter annually this year, iSuppli said.

"Everywhere I go, it is pretty clear that everyone wants a notebook," Shenoy said.

"If your notebook breaks, would you wait six months before you get it fix or get a new one? No way."

(US$1=T$32.7)

(Reporting by Baker Li, Editing by Doug Young)