Samsung Hits U.S. Notebook Market

By Jane McEntegart, published on October 14, 2008 at 7:00 AM
Source: Tom's Guide | Keywords: Samsung, Notebooks, North, America | Themes: Business, Business Notebooks

Syndication:

Samsung Electronics has announced that the company will begin selling its notebooks in North America.

While the company has sold laptops outside the states for some time now, Samsung this morning announced the introduction of a line of notebooks set to take the U.S. market by storm. The new line ranges from netbooks (yet another addition to the already bursting-at-the-seams UMPC market) to 16-inch multimedia monsters.

A few months back, Samsung had the press all a flap with claims it was going to quit the notebook business if things didn’t improve dramatically in three years’ time.

According to PC Pro, back in May, Sukyong Hong, senior manager of overseas sales and marketing at Samsung, claimed that the company needed to ship 11 million laptops in 2011 if its notebook division were to remain "sustainable." With 1.7 percent of the global laptop market, these figures meant Samsung needed to more than triple that percentage to meet what the company described in a presentation as a “minimal survival” volume, PC Pro reports.

A couple of days later damage control kicked into high gear and Samsung sent out a statement saying the company had no intentions of quitting the market.

"Samsung has no intention of closing its Notebook division in 2011. We do however expect the market to become increasingly saturated and therefore for there to be increased price competitiveness,” the company told PC Pro. "In light of this Samsung Electronics has set an ambitious but realistic goal of achieving 5.7% market share by 2011 to sustain profitability,” the statement read.

Looks like Samsung is hell bent on achieving those figures.