Post-HP: Arima to target clone notebook market

After giving up its bid for Hewlett-Packard’s (HP) notebook orders for the second half of the year, Taiwan’s Arima Computer now plans to focus on the clone notebook market, industry sources said.Arima expects shipments to clone notebook vendors to account for around 40% of its total notebook shipments this year.According to sources, the company hopes to gain renown in the clone notebook market before making a comeback in the international OEM market. The term "clone notebook vendor" is said to refer to notebook vendors that are not among the top ten in the worldwide market.Japan’s Hitachi is currently one of Arima’s important clone notebook clients, sources added.Until now, Arima’s biggest orders have been for HP’s Presario 900 and the earlier Presario 700 notebooks, which each commanded about one million units in shipments. Sources project that the loss of HP’s orders would drag down Arima’s overall notebook shipments from 1.8 million notebooks last year to about one million units this year.NEC is Arima’s biggest OEM client after HP. So far, though, Arima has only landed orders for a 12.1-inch LaVie G series (dubbed "Versa S800" outside Japan) from NEC. The model, using Intel’s PIII-M 933 MHz processors and weighing only 1.15 kilograms, is said to be popular in the Japanese market where sales have reached as many as 10,000 units per month.HP’s notebook orders for the second half, codenamed Martin and Square, have reportedly been acquired by Compal Electronics and are scheduled to ship next quarter. These two models, equipped with Intel and AMD processors, respectively, will aim at the low-price notebook market and are projected to ship about 100,000 units per month.Source: DigiTimes