ASUS CEO Jerry Shen today finally spoke about all the speculation on the company pushing netbook prices up by 20% from March. It turned out to be something of a misunderstanding if Shen’s words are to be interpreted right, as he said,

“Actually, the price is based on market competition so until now, for the netbook, the product shift from nine-inch to ten-inch models will help in Q1. So most of the product will be ten-inch based and so the price will be a little bit higher than the nine inch. But that’s based on the [move from nine to ten inches], not on the original price.

And for the notebooks, actually, there’s a lot of inventory from our competitors, so there’s no way to raise the price much.”

Summarizing all that, Shen said the price rises will happen but only because of the introduction of 10-inch screen netbooks which do cost more than their smaller counterparts.

Source: CrunchGear