AMI-Partners: APAC SMBs to Spend US$16 Billion on Laptops, Netbooks, and Tablets in 2011

— Tablets constitute a small percentage of SMBs’ spending on non-desktop PCs —

SINGAPORE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Small and medium businesses (SMBs, companies with less than 1000 employees), across Asia-Pacific, excluding Japan (APAC), will spend US$16 billion on non-desktop PCs in 2011, much higher than spending on desktop PCs. Non-desktop PCs include laptops, netbooks and tablets. While tablets have attracted much media attention of late, the bulk of APAC SMB spending on non-desktop PCs is on laptops and netbooks.

“The PC industry is going through an exciting stage”

These findings emerge from multi-year research by New York-based Access Markets International (AMI) Partners, Inc. According to the latest results, APAC SMBs are expected to spend more than 96% of the US$16 billion on laptops and netbooks. Small-size touch-screen devices like Apple iPad, Dell Streak, HP Slate, RIM Playbook are classified as tablets. These tablets only account for less than 1% of the expected non-desktop PC spending in the APAC region.

“The PC industry is going through an exciting stage,” says Dr. Vu-Thanh Nguyen, Research Analyst in AMI-Partners’ Singapore office, “where consumer-oriented devices are filtering into enterprises and enterprise-focused players are creating devices to cater to consumer needs. Mobile phones are becoming more powerful and are being designed to mimic PCs and traditional PCs are becoming smaller to be more mobile. While tablets are useful for media consumption, entertainment, and communication, people will eventually realize that a small screen (say, less than 12 inches) is not really optimal for everyday work. For business purposes, we believe that many people will give priority to screen size, network connectivity, and portability. That’s why portable PCs – especially light-weight convertibles, hybrids, and large-screen slates – will continue to be the computer of choice for businesses compared to small-screen netbooks and tablets.”

In the long term, as more businesses turn to a virtualized desktop environment, cloud computing, and the software-as-a-service model, the need for powerful PC-like end-user devices may diminish over time. We may see larger adoption of convergent devices like Motorola Atrix 4G, a pocketsize smartphone which can connect to external monitors to run browsers and applications on larger screens. Even then, portable PCs with integrated large screens will still be important tools in many business environments.

Related Studies

AMI’s Global IT Forecast Model provides an authoritative view of IT adoption and spending patterns in the SMB space across 28 IT sectors and 29 countries, with roll ups to regional and worldwide views. Updated in Q2 and Q4 each year, the Global Model provides ever-increasing strategic market planning value via expanding geographic and IT sector coverage. Sector-specific adoption and spending patterns are further broken out by industry-standard employee size and vertical market categories. Products and services covered include established and emerging hardware, software, applications, and business process solutions.

AMI's extensive surveys among SMB IT decision makers, one-on-one in-depth SMB interviews, combined with country-specific economic and industry analysis provide the most comprehensive SMB-focused strategic market planning tool to the IT vendor community. Based on AMI’s annual surveys of SMBs across the world, our studies track a broad spectrum of issues pertaining to budgets, purchase behaviors, decision influencers, channel preferences, outsourcing, service, and support. Also covered are detailed firmographics and critically important technology attitudes and strategic planning priorities. These data point to key opportunities and messaging hot buttons for vendors and service providers seeking to match their offerings to SMB market requirements.

For more information about our studies, AMI-Partners, or our global SMB research, call 212-944-5100, e-mail [e-mail], or visit us at www.ami-partners.com.

About Access Markets International (AMI) Partners, Inc.

AMI-Partners specializes in IT, Internet, telecommunications and business services strategy, venture capital, and actionable market intelligence — with a strong focus on global small and medium businesses (SMBs), and extending into large enterprises and home-based businesses. The AMI-Partners mission is to empower clients for success with the highest quality data, business strategy perspectives and “go-to-market” solutions. Led by Andy Bose, the firm has built a world-class management team with deep experience cutting across IT, telecommunications and business services sectors in established and emerging markets.

AMI-Partners has helped shape the go-to-market SMB strategies of more than 150 leading IT, Internet, telecommunications and business services companies. The firm is well known for its IT and Internet adoption-based segmentation of the SMB markets; its annual retainership services based on global SMB tracking surveys in more than 25 countries; and its proprietary database of SMBs and SMB channel partners in the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific. The firm invests significantly in collecting survey-based information from several thousand SMBs annually, and is considered the premier source for global SMB trends and analysis.