PCs have been the primary medium for content consumption for years now and the huge growth that the PC market has seen in the past few years looks to have slowed down. In 2010 analysts believed that the PC market was headed for a correction and it did.
Vendor’s performances have become variable as they have had to deal with significant inventory build up, changes to their product mix, and the fact that growth has been coming mostly from emerging markets. Vendors are having to shift resources away from mature consumer markets. They are also invested in developing media tablets, many of which launched in the first half of 2011. Here are some stats from the report.
- HP continued to be the worldwide leader, as it accounted for 17.5 percent of worldwide PC shipments in the second quarter of 2011.
- Dell moved into second place owing to their performance in Asia/Pacific region.
- Lenovo achieved the highest growth among the top tier vendors, they too owe their high griwth rate to the company’s performance in the Asia/Pacific region.
- Acer’s low margin volume based strategy did not help the company and it showed the poorest growth figures among all the top tier vendors.
- Given the hype around media tablets such as the iPad, retailers were very conservative in placing orders for PCs. Instead, they wanted to secure space for media tablets. Some PC vendors had to lower their inventory through promotions, while others slimmed their product lines at retailers. The demand for PCs varies greatly when we look at a geographic picture of the scenario.
- Demand for PCs in Europe, Middle-East and Africa was low and retail channel feedback is pessimistic towards growth.
- In Asia/Pacific, PC shipments reached 30.5 million units in the second quarter of 2011, a 9.6 percent increase from the same period last year.
- India showed weaker-than-expected consumer demand, while China’s PC market grew 10.9 percent year over year. China’s growth was attributed to the release of pent-up demand for consumer PCs.
You can see the complete report here.
