White Box PC Makers In Trouble

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But the growing popularity of notebook PCs spells big trouble for the future of white-box manufacturing. The "white-book" market has dwindled from an already-small 8.5 percent share to a 5.6 percent share between 2003 and 2006. That comes while notebooks have, over the same period of time, become the dominant PC form factor for top vendors Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Lenovo, and Acer, accounting for two-thirds of consumer PC sales. The smaller PC assemblers can't participate as easily in the notebook market. That's because their bread and butter--an oversupply of parts they can buy at a discount--are intended more and more for specific notebook models.