The PC industry has hit hard times as the tablet and smartphone markets have begun to eat away at PC sales. This is especially true for notebooks, though manufacturers are trying desperately to compete with features such as touchscreens.
The segment’s downturn has affected even the largest manufacturers. A DigiTimes report today shows that even Samsung and Apple are not immune to the changing tech landscape.
The report’s unnamed “sources from the upstream supply chain” are cited as saying that Samsung has placed only 40% of the notebook component orders it had expected to during June, July, and October. As a result, those same sources believe that Samsung will miss its notebook shipment targets for the year. The Korean manufacturer is now expected to ship only 13 million notebooks during 2013 – a small drop from the 13.8 million notebooks it shipped during 2012.
The report also states that Apple is likely to cut back on its PC orders. For the past three months, Apple iMac shipments are reportedly down 50% year-over-year. Though new MacBook Pro models should even out the company’s orders, the segment is now not a focus for Apple.
If lowered orders weren’t enough of a burden for component manufacturers, a report last week revealed that some of them are now being pressured into partially paying for manufacturers’ cloud computing initiatives. At least some component manufacturers are paying up, fearful that dwindling notebook orders could leave altogether.
