The robust growth of laptop sales boosted personal computer shipments in the Chinese mainland in the past quarter, a report from Gartner Inc said.

The firm is one of the biggest information and communications consulting firms in the world.

Asia-Pacific operations of the US-based research house said the shipments of notebooks into the Chinese mainland grew by 56 percent year-on-year, while those of desktop PCs only gained 3 percent over the same period of last year.

The overall PC market grew 8 percent year-on-year and 14.5 percent quarter for the quarter.

The total shipments stood at 3.6 million units and the proportion of laptops rose to 13 percent from 9 percent for the third quarter of 2002.

"An aggressive pricing strategy among domestic PC vendors led to the fact that most of their PC boxes were either not bundled with an operating system or installed with Linux only, which helped boost the popularity of the Linux at the point of purchase," said Annie Chung, principal analyst at Gartner Hong Kong.

Previously, most PC vendors adopted Microsoft Windows OS for their computers, but with intensifying competition, they have to cut costs and the adoption of Linux costs only about one 10th of the price of former.

The Chinese mainland's share in the total of Asia-Pacific region shed slightly year-on-year from last year's 47.4 percent to 46.4 percent.

In the whole of the Asia-Pacific region, excluding Japan, PC shipments totalled 7.7 million units in the third quarter, an 11 percent increase from the prior year's period.

"It has been a good quarter in the Asia-Pacific region where we see a strong rebound of 9.2 percent from the previous quarter," said Lillian Tay, principal analyst for Gartner's Hardware and Systems Asia Pacific Group. "All countries, with the exception of South Korea, have registered yearly positive growth rates."

She believes that the recovery momentum will continue as wireless commuting represented by wireless local area networks has become a popular choice, together with a wide choice of notebooks at different performance and price points.

Of all mobile PCs shipped into the Asia-Pacific area, Intel Centrino processor-based laptops, just released in Q2, have increased from a market share of 12 percent in the previous quarter to 31 percent this quarter.

(China Daily November 8, 2003)