IDC Finds that Tablets Aren't Affecting PC Shipments That Much in Canada

Market analysts have already started to say how tablets are eating away at the netbook, notebook and, according to some, even the desktop market share, but IDC Canada claims to have found only minor consequences in terms of PC shipments.

The Mobile World Congress expo in Barcelona, Spain, saw the launch of quite a few new tablets, particularly Tegra 2-based ones running Android 3.0 (Honeycomb).

As such, one can expect this market segment to grow substantially once all newcomers actually start selling.

This means that sales of netbooks and laptops may start to decline visibly in the wake of their growing shipments.

This sort of situation has not been reached yet, however, or so says IDC Canada, where the overall PC market grew in Q4 2010.

According to a press release, the overall Canadian PC market grew by 5.6% during the fourth quarter of 2010.

This put the total shipments at 1,807,034 units, with portable PCs growing by 2.9% year-over-year (1,196,342 units) and desktops by 11.4% (610,692 units in total for Q4), though this actually was lower than expected.

"The increase in the "consumerization" of traditional commercial channels is notable and represents a significant shift in the purchasing behavior of Canadian businesses toward the retail channel, which now accounts for 50% of PC client shipments," said Tim Brunt, senior analyst, Personal Computing at IDC Canada.

"With businesses increasingly buying through retail channels, and buying more consumer-designed products, the market saw an almost 10% reduction in the average selling value of the PCs purchased by commercial clients. Meanwhile, despite the attention given to Media Tablets, their impact on PC shipments has thus far been negligible."

The category that did see decline was that of Mini Notebooks, accounting for 8% of all portable shipments, as opposed to Q4 of 2009, when they had a share of 24%.