Qualcomm CEO: Netbooks May Soon Outsell Notebooks

According to Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs, netbooks could soon dominate the PC market, outselling larger notebooks. Jacobs did not want to speculate on when exactly netbooks would overtake notebooks, but in an interview with Bloomberg, he said it would happen “relatively quickly”.

Now Qualcomm has a vested interest in seeing netbooks succeed, so I would take the comments with a pinch of salt. It is looking to push its Snapdragon platform to netbooks in competition with Intel’s Atom CPU. There is no doubt that netbook growth is seeing huge growth compared to netbooks. DisplaySearch released a report recently that forecast netbook growth of 66 percent in 2009 compared to just 3 percent for notebooks. However, netbook shipments in 2009 are only expected to be 27 million units, much lower than that expected for notebooks at 133 million units. That gap won’t close that quickly in our view.