“The sound growth of notebook sales has led to an intensification in competition, which has put great pressure on prices. This year, gross laptop margins dropped below 5 percent, compared to 7-10 percent in 2007,” the General Manager of Aline Distribution, Bogdan Tufeanu, told Business Standard. Aline Distribution is one of the top players on the local IT distribution market.
Notebook sales, in terms of units, increased 127.6 percent in the first quarter of the year, compared to Q1 2007, while the advance in value was 96.3 percent, according to data by International Data Corporation (IDC) research company.
Gross profit margins on the notebook segment will keep dropping due to increasing competition, agrees the CEO of Scop Computers, Horia Chitu. “We continue to sell certain models at good margins, but others have yielded losses,” Chitu added.
According to IDC estimates, the overall PC market is to increase 35 percent this year. In 2007, desktop, notebook and server sales amounted to 944,000 units, 48 percent higher than in 2006, worth $826 million (€574.2 mln).
