Taiwan's notebook shipments dropped 9.8% sequentially and 2.6% on year to only 41.42 million units in the first quarter of 2011. Global notebook shipments also dropped 8.9% sequentially and 1.7% on year to 46.94 million units due to weak overall demand plus Intel's defective chip incident, according to Digitimes Research senior analyst Joanne Chien.

In addition to the weak performance of netbooks, Chien believes that the traditional notebook segment is also facing a challenge from tablet PCs with the segment's shipments in the first quarter down 9.9% sequentially and saw no growth on year.

However, under the unfriendly economic status, China-based Lenovo and the US-based Apple still managed to achieve excellent performance for the first quarter. Taiwan's traditional notebook shipments to Lenovo in the first quarter surpassed those of Dell and were only 0.5pp less than Acer at number two.

Although Apple has also been affected by Intel's defective incident, the strong market demand for its MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, still allowed the company to place total orders of 2.8 million notebooks with its upstream ODM/OEM partners. Of which, about 20%, or 600,000 units were orders for MacBook Air, Chien added.