VIA eyes 15-percent netbook chip market share

VIA Technologies, Taiwan’s largest designer of CPUs, is looking to grab at least a 15-percent global netbook chip share in 2009. VIA expects to supply more netbook brands this year. Epan Wu, director of VIA’s CPU product marketing department said: “We had 15 percent of total netbook (chip) shipments last year and we hope we can at least maintain that level this year. This year’s growth in netbooks will be much bigger than last year. It will be very good if we follow that growth.”

Intel dominates the netbook market with an 85-percent market share. Its Atom CPUs feature in most of the netbooks from the biggest netbook vendors. However, VIA hopes that it will start to win some new clients from Intel. “There will be some more clients in the second half,” said Wu, who declined to identify the new clients.

Its new surfboard chipset designed for netbooks may also see it win more clients, especially with the promise of 1080p playback. Up until now we have had Samsung (NC20) and HP (Mini 2133) who have used VIA CPUs.