Good news! For the first time in six years, things are looking up! PC shipments have been declining since 2011, but the 2017 holidays season brought good news for the longsuffering market.
Signaling perhaps the winds of change for the PC hardware industry.
This report from IDC, the market tracker, reveals that shipments of new PCs rose in the fourth quarter of the year 2017 by 0.7%, compared to Q4 2016. And while the numbers still show the market is week, there are signs that things are stabilizing.
Neha Mahajan, IDC senior research analyst for Devices & Displays:
“The solid holiday consumer sales provided enough momentum for the PC market to stabilize a bit further. However, the growing popularity of other mobile form factors continued to have a dampening effect and led the overall U.S. PC market to perform below expectations.”
Jay Chou, research manager with IDC’s Personal Computing Device Tracker, also had a similar review:
“The fourth quarter results showed some potentially encouraging headway against the difficult environment in retail and consumer PCs. Enticed by a growing array of products that promise all-day battery life, high portability, and address emerging use cases that require more compute power, pockets of the consumer base are taking a serious look at these revamped PCs. However, the overall PC market remains a challenging one.”
In terms of region, the United States actually saw a decline in PC shipments, including both desktop and notebooks sales. This was offset by strong growth in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
Same goes for Asia-Pacific and Japan, which saw strong demand.
As for the individual companies and market share, HP remained in first place, while Lenovo and Dell followed in second and third place respectively. ASUS, meanwhile, showed the largest declines, posting a double-digit decline.
Good stuff!
