Ivy Bridge ultrabooks to speed double-digit mobile sales
Intel marketing to accelerate already-strong portables growth
Intel has unleashed what it claims is its biggest marketing push "in a long, long time" to drive the potentially high sales of mobile devices powered by the 22nm Ivy Bridge chipset through the channel.
Speaking at the Intel Platinum partner summit in London, Greg Pearson, the chip maker giant's global vice president of sales and marketing and general manger of worldwide sales and operations, said the firm has kicked off its campaign to promote the ultrabook category, "inspired by Intel", "starting right now" across internet, social media, print and TV channels.
"We ae going to push this really hard. We didn't push [the Ivy Bridge predecessor] Sandy Bridge very hard, because we were getting ready for Ivy Bridge. So expect us to really step up and be the demand generation machine you want us to be," Pearson said.
The 22nm Ivy Bridge chipsets are going into ultrabooks – the newest category of laptop. Ultrabooks are both thin and light despite being fully featured, with powerful processing and batteries that can last all day. Previously, even top-of-the-range ultraportables made significant trade-offs of processing power, memory and battery life.
Intel believes ultrabooks will be popular enough to revive laptop and PC sales, while beating off challenges from the likes of certain ARM-based devices and smartphones.
Even though times have been tough, the western Europe channel has performed very strongly, especially in sales of internet-connected devices.
Christian Morales, EMEA vice president and general manager at Intel, said the sales potential is there, with the major barrier being the speed of infrastructure development to support the more powerful applications that are now being used online via a range of connected devices.
"[Last year] saw 23 per cent growth year on year in western Europe, and that is across sales of all connected devices," Morales said.
That compared with 34 per cent year on year in China, 31 per cent year on year in Brazil, and 12 per cent year on year in the US, according to figures Morales produced at the summit. "We expect that [kind of sales growth] to continue for the next few years," he added.
Other channel opportunities
Maurits Tichelman, EMEA channel director at Intel, said other particularly strong channel opportunities in coming years included SSD, digital signage, all-in-one PCs, and education. There would be increasing demand for features and functionality previously desired only by gamers and other extreme computing enthusiasts.
"And the education opportunity is not only about the Classmate, but the solutions, and software," said Tichelman. "With all-in-ones, these are really just fancy PCs with a big screen and full capability. This segment is growing at 30 to 40 per cent on a yearly basis."