14 DAY TRIAL // Over the past three months, and some might say for an even longer time, market watchers and analysts have been adjusting their forecasts in regards to the personal computer segment.
Well, we say “adjusting” when, in fact, the shipment forecasts have only been getting less and less promising.
In fact, PC sales are weak, and are expected to get even weaker by the end of the year. The latest update on this matter comes from international Data Corporation, or IDC for short.
The analyst firm believes that PC shipments will fall by 9.7% year-over-year in 2013. That would make it the longest decline period ever recorded for this segment.
Then again, the market contraction period, as IDC calls it, has already proven to be the longest ever.
As before, tablets are considered as the main ones responsible for this decline, given their ravenous behavior towards the market share of notebooks.
And that only makes this more worrisome because the tablet market has finally stopped growing.
"The days where one can assume tablet disruptions are purely a First World problem are over," said Jay Chou, senior research analyst, Worldwide Quarterly PC Trackers at IDC.
"Advances in PC hardware, such as improvements in the power efficiency of x86 processors remain encouraging, and Windows 8.1 is also expected to address a number of well-documented concerns. However, the current PC usage experience falls short of meeting changing usage patterns that are spreading through all regions, especially as tablet price and performance become ever more attractive."
IDC expects PC shipments to continue falling throughout 2014, sue to slowdowns in China and possible faltering in the US. Even emerging markets have been suffering from product shipment declines lately.
Only in 2015 will there be a slow rebound, and even that might not last. By that point, wearable gadgets like Google Glass will be selling, and they may just become to the IT industry what tablets became to notebooks.