Local supplies of Asus Eee PCs now stable

MANILA, Philippines - Philippine supplies of the popular subnotebook Asus Eee PC have “stabilized," although demand remains high, the local office of the Taiwanese PC maker said. “The demand was really huge during the months following the launch, so supply was really tight. But it has already stabilized and we’ve got the market fully covered," Asus Philippines executive Jason Teh said in a phone interview. Owing to its popularity, local supplies of the sub-laptop initially ran out of stock, Teh admitted. Eee PC, which uses solid state memory as storage instead of a hard disk, have been selling like hotcakes since its Philippine introduction in end-2007, Teh said. This trend reflects a recent research report which said that personal computer sales in Asia continued to be robust owing to strong demand for portable PCs including the Asus Eee PC. However, Teh failed to say whether a rival’s recently-launched product—the Neo eXplore, the first locally-assembled sub-laptop based on the design of Intel’s Classmate PC—reduced the demand for the Eee PC. The Asus product is distributed in the country by Banbros Commercial and Innovista Technologies Inc. To sustain its sales momentum, Teh said that the company has set the local launch of the Eee PC 900, the device’s latest incarnation, during the second week of May. The upgraded model, which comes in either Windows XP and Linux operating system, has one gigabyte (GB) of memory, 12GB of storage, and an 8.9-inch screen. Like the first-generation Eee PC 700, which was priced at P17,000, the new model runs on a Celeron processor. Chipmaker Intel recently announced a new line of processors, the Atom, which are specifically targeted at ultra-mobile devices such as the Eee PC. The new processors, however, has yet to make its debut this June. Asus said the Eee PC has received great response from all over the world, with sales figures of 350,000 units sold since its inception and with a projected three to five million units to be sold this year. - GMANews.TV