According to market analysts Gartner and IDC, the global demand for personal computers (PC) shipments declined in the first quarter of 2019.
Both the analysts indicated that the PC shipments around the world totalled 58.5 million units during the quarter. While Gartner says that it is a decline of 4.6% from the first quarter last year, IDC indicated a 3% decline.
“We saw the start of a rebound in PC shipments in mid-2018, but anticipation of a disruption by CPU shortages impacted all PC markets as vendors allocated to the higher-margin business and Chromebook segment,” said Mikako Kitagawa, senior principal analyst at Gartner.
“While the consumer market remained weak, the mix of product availability may have also hindered demand. In contrast, Chromebook shipments increased by double digits compared with the first quarter of 2018, despite the shortage of entry-level CPUs. Including Chromebook shipments, the total worldwide PC market decline would have been 3.5 percent in the first quarter of 2019.”
The analysts said that there was a shortage of Intel processors, which contributed to the shrinkage in the first quarter. However, the market still performed better than expected.
“Desktop PCs were surprisingly resilient as the commercial segment helped drive a refresh during the quarter,” said Jitesh Ubrani, research manager for IDC’s Mobile Device Trackers. “Capitalizing on this refresh cycle, the top vendors – HP, Lenovo, and Dell – each increased their year-over-year volume and captured additional share in the desktop PC market.”
Both Gartner and IDC placed HP, Lenovo, Dell, and Apple among the top four PC vendors, but the rankings varied.
As per Gartner, Lenovo, HP, and Dell together held a 61.5% market share in the first quarter of 2019, compared to 56.9% in the first quarter of 2018.
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IDC reported that more PC brands opted for AMD chips, and turned to Windows 10 migration. This led the market from traditional PCs to commercial and premium products. The reason behind users shifting to Windows 10 is because Microsoft will end support for Windows 7 next year.
Although, there are slight differences between the stats by Gartner and IDC, but the numbers aren’t too dissimilar.
