HP experienced a 9% profit decline during this year’s first quarter, but the company clarifies that it wasn’t due to netbooks cannibalizing sales of their traditional notebook computers. Instead, HP CEO Mark Hurd blamed the global economic recession as one of the main culprits, as well as the broadening of available products that the company is offering. As a result of this profit decline, the company will enfore salary cuts on all Executive Council members and even its own Chief Executive, but this is done in order to let the company “emerge from this recession in a powerful position to create value for our customers, employees and shareholders over the long term and be in a better position to fund 2009 bonus programs,” according to a follow-up company statement regarding the matter. Read more notes on the company’s recent conference call over at CNET.

Via CNET

Recently, Asus and NTT Docomo of Japan has started negotiating on a possible cooperative agreement that will see the Asus Eee PC netbooks getting bundled with NTT Docomo’s various Internet data plan. Asus is currently getting around 85% of its product sales from the Japanese market and the company is aiming to get 70% of the Japanese consumer market for its Eee PCs, while leaving the remaining 30% to other mainstream notebooks. Hence, Asus is targeting to ship more volumes of the Eee PCs to the Japanese market sometime in the Q4.

The Eee PC 901 and Eee PC 4G-X currently occupies the first and second spot in terms of volume sales of PCs with prices ranging below $946.52. Combining the two machines total sales gives Asus a 70.5% of total PC sales in the country so far.

Meanwhile, Acer’s Aspire One only accounted for 9% and MSI got 8% share of the PC market sales. Lagging behind these four netbooks is HP’s Mini-Note.

Via DIGITIMES