PC Sales Rise, Acer Loses Third Place

With the earnings season is well underway, findings have been largely in the positive spectrum, though not everyone involved in the field of IT has cause for celebration, as Acer's PC sales performance shows.

Reports concerning the financial happenings on the IT market haven't been at all scarce lately, and it looks like a new one has now appeared.

It so happens that IDC has finished its analysis of the PC market, at least as far as the second quarter of 2011 is concerned.

What the company found was, overall, promising (84.4 million PCs), though the top 5 computer supplier list went through changes.

"These preliminary results continue to reflect pressure from competing consumer and business products as well as cautious spending," said Jay Chou, senior research analyst with IDC's Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker.

"Nevertheless, product refreshes and promotions in the second half of the year as well as easier year-ago data should boost growth in the second half of the year."

While the on-year and sequential increases in shipments were of 2.6% and 4.8%, respectively, Acer, apparently, didn't go through its greatest three-month period.

Essentially, while HP and Dell held onto the first and second places, respectively, Acer lost third place to Lenovo, even as Toshiba has been itself, growing.

"The U.S. PC market continued to contract in 2Q11, largely as a result of three factors. The first is an ongoing contraction in the Mini Notebook (Netbook) market and related inventories.” says Rajani Singh, research analyst, United States Quarterly PC Tracker.

“The second is the impact of 2Q10's difficult-to-sustain 12% growth. And third, demand has softened as corporate buyers continue to focus on increasing share of their IT budget in new IT solutions such as cloud and virtualization, and consumer interest shifts to media tablets. Given the weakness of 2H10, we expect a better market environment in 2H11 with mid-single digit growth rates in the third quarter's back to school and fourth quarter's holiday season."