14 DAY TRIAL // This seems to be the month of financial updates, for the IT sector at least, and we've finally reached the point where we report on how the PC market progressed during the last quarter.
What we are looking at are analysis results from Gartner and International Data Corporation (IDC), for the April-June period.
Both found overall PC shipments to be rather disappointing, lower by 0.1% compared to the same period of the previous year.
This might not seem like much, until one remembers that 2011 was a worse year, economically speaking, for everyone. There should be plenty more potential customers than back then.
“Uncertainties in the economy in various regions, as well as consumer’s low interest in PC purchases, were some of the key influencers of slow PC shipment growth. Despite the high expectations for the thin and light notebook segment, Ultrabooks, shipment volume was small and little impact on overall shipment growth,” said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner.
Unfortunately, that coveted jump in computer sales has not occurred. Gartner blames it on users supposedly turning their attention to smartphones and tablets, but IDC thinks it has more to do with the upcoming operating system.
Microsoft will release Windows 8 in October, which means that most people may just be holding off on a new PC purchase until that software is available.
"These latest results validate IDC's expectation that the second quarter would be a transition period where both economic factors and anticipation for new products in the second half of the year would result in relatively low PC shipment growth," said Jay Chou, senior research analyst, Worldwide PC Tracker.
HP suffered the brunt of the drop in sales, with a 12.1% shipment decline during 2Q12, Lenovo grew by 14.9%, but it wasn't enough to overtake HP, even after its less than stellar performance. The gap is almost gone though (14.9 vs 14.7 of the total PC industry), so Lenovo might just become top PC maker by the time the aforementioned Windows 8 appears.