Components Shortages Blamed for 11th Straight Quarterly Decline in PC Sales
Worldwide Q2 PC shipments hit their lowest quarterly volume since 2007, said a Gartner report. The 61.1 million shipments overall in Q2 were a 4.3 percent falloff from the year-ago quarter, for the 11th consecutive quarter of declining shipments amid…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
a five-year “slump,” Gartner said. Component shortages for DRAM, solid-state drives and LCD panels had a “pronounced negative impact” on PC demand in the quarter, said analyst Mikako Kitagawa. Vendors took different approaches to higher component costs, with some absorbing the costs without raising final product prices, while others passed on higher costs to end users, Kitagawa said. Price hikes have a bigger impact in the consumer market than the enterprise market, where prices are typically locked in based on a contract, the analyst said. “Many consumers are willing to postpone their purchases until the price pressure eases,” she said. In the U.S., Q2 PC shipments to consumers totaled 14 million units, down 5.7 percent from Q2 2016, on weak demand, said Gartner. The business PC market showed “some consistent growth,” but the education market felt pressure from strong Chromebook demand, Kitagawa said. The Chromebook market has been growing much faster than the overall PC market, said Gartner, which doesn’t include Chromebook shipments in PC figures. Worldwide Chromebook shipments grew 38 percent in 2016, while the overall PC market declined 6 percent, it said. Chromebooks are not a PC replacement “as of now,” said Kitagawa, but they could be in the future with improved connectivity and more offline capability. HP reclaimed the top position from Lenovo in the worldwide PC market in Q2, with 3.3 percent growth over Q2 2016 to 12.7 million units, for 20.8 percent market share, said Gartner, while Lenovo shipments fell 8.4 percent to 12.2 million for 19.9 percent share. Dell shipments, at 15.6 percent share, were up 1.4 percent in the quarter, and Apple shipments were roughly flat at 4.2 million, for 6.9 percent share. Asus and Acer shipments dropped 10.3 percent and 12.5 percent in the quarter, giving the companies 6.6 percent and 6.3 percent share, said Gartner.