PC Market
According to Gartner’s latest report on the PC market shipments and marketshare, the company is reporting that overall global PC shipments shrunk 0.5% year over year. However, if you look at the US and EMEA figures, you see that the US grew by a sizable 4.2% and Europe more than doubled that by growing a hefty 9.6%.
What this means is that even though the US and Europe, which are considered developed markets, saw significant growth, the losses in Asia and other global markets (Latin America and Africa) ate up all of those growths in shipments. Also, Gartner’s data does not include Chromebooks or non-x86 tablet PCs, which may even skew the US and EU PC market figures downward where we’re seeing a huge resurgence of Chromebooks.
As you can tell from Gartner’s PC Market table for the entire global market, Lenovo continues to see incredibly strong growth year over year mostly at the cost of ‘other’ PC market vendors who saw their shipments decreasee 15.5%. The reality is that the global PC market last quarter was effectively flat when compared to last year since 0.5% is almost within their margin of error. As such, any gains are very likely at the cost of some other competitor.
In the US, HP still continues to be the number one vendor in the PC market even though Dell seems to be catching up to them, showing the largest growth, a whopping 18.4% year over year. Apple also saw fairly good growth, meaning that their overall marketshare of the US PC market continues to grow. Toshiba was actually the only major vendor to see a significant decrease in shipments, which is very likely due to the fact that the company’s overall product line in the US is fairly weak. Globally, Toshiba is not even ranked top 5.
Europe is a fantastic story for the PC market and overall the top four vendors saw fantastic growth with HP seeing 14% growth while Lenovo and Acer both saw over 40% growth year over year. Even ASUS saw over 33% growth in the third quarter compared to last year, which bodes really well for the Asian manufacturers. In fact, the companies’ contraction in Asia is very likely offset by growth in Europe where ASPs are generally higher.
Overall, it appears as though the PC market is nowhere near finished and that tablets are not having the impact that many would have you believe. The developed markets have had their time with tablets and the saturation of tablets has pretty much reached its peak. The PC Market in Asia and other markets is either struggling due to reduced overall economic demand (like in China) or due to tablets still not having reached saturation levels that they have in the developed markets. If you consider that the developed markets are generally more profitable for most PC manufacturers (regardless of where they’re from) then most PC manufacturers will consider the third quarter a good one that could be better.
