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A not too surprising announcement today from Asus, as they fell 300,000 short of their goal to sell 2 million Asus Eees during the first half of 08. Of course, 1,700,000 units of anything is nothing to sneeze at, but after their 07 success Asus was clearly expecting the good times to go one forever. However, they are still confident they will make their goal of 5 million sold during all of 08, clearly banking on back to school and holiday sales as well as the Eee 901/1000 releases.

Admittedly some of the shortfall is not Asus’ fault. Intensified competition, Atom shortage, economic downturn…none of these are factors which bode well for consumer tech sales of any kind, let alone a “luxury” item such as the Eee.

However, most of Asus’ wounds right now are self inflicted. They are announcing too many products with no clear strategy which always confuses buyers. Too many models would be bad enough, but since they are always leaking yet another new version coming soon, buyers are likely to wait and see what else is coming. No one likes buying a product then regretting it the next week when a better model is announced. Asus has lost a lot of the consumer confidence they had after the 701’s success. Add to all of that the fact they have moved from having the lowest prices in their space to the highest (or nearly the highest) and it really seems that Asus has lost their way in this space.

The next half of the year is going to get harder for Asus and other UMPC vendors not easier, as more and more units flood the market place. In the face of that competition, it doesn’t help that Asus is acting like a fly-by-night outfit, trying to milk all they can out of a brand before it runs dry and they hide the money. Rather then coming in under expectations, I think Asus would be wise to just lower those expectations and suspend their ambitious roadmap for the time being. They should focus on what they have ready for shelves NOW, not what may be coming out sometime in the amorphous future.

In related news, Acer has looked at Asus’ troubles and declared themselves unconcerned and confident that the Aspire One will be a big seller for them despite mediocre to poor reviews. They are planning on the XP version moving 15,000 units a day. Yeah right. I think under the circumstances, Acer should pass Asus a little of what they are smoking, they could use the munchies.

(Source – Digitimes)

Zealot (468 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

By day a department manager and writer for a major network device vendor...by night Zealot stalks the mean magnetic streets, striking fear into the hearts of bandwidth abusers and theme park mascots. Zealot has been involved with mobile devices for more than a decade now, starting off with dumb phones, moving to PDAs and then to smartphones, notebooks and netbooks with the odd PMP thrown in. Most of his mobile time currently is spent on a Treo Pro, Zune HD, Thinkpad T61, Gigabyte M912M or a Hackintoshed Compaq Mini 704. He proudly groks the Geek community and considers himself a Neo Maxi Zune Dweebie (thanks Will Wheaton!).