In the fourth quarter of 2011, shipment volume of the Greater Chinese notebook PC industry continued to be affected by the global economic situation where the end-market demand remained sluggish and the inventory pull-in momentum came to a halt. At the supply-end, due to Thailand's severe flooding, the supply of HDDs was affected and some branded vendors were unable to deliver end-market products. At the beginning, in order to response to the incident, branded vendors reduced the number of HDDs for use on their netbook PCs and put priority to their mainstream notebook PCs instead. However, up until December 2011, the effect of HDD shortage was worse than expected and further affected the supply of HDDs for mainstream notebook PCs, thereby driving down the industry's overall shipment in the fourth quarter of 2011. Consequently, shipment volume of the Greater Chinese notebook PC industry reached 44.45 million units, down 5.2% sequentially. Of the total 44.45 million notebook PCs in the fourth quarter of 2011, 3.75 million units of which were netbook PCs. In the fourth quarter of 2011, netbook PC shipment volume declined by 16.6% in comparison to the third quarter of 2011.