14 DAY TRIAL // Nobody appears to be able to save the collapsing PC market, not even Apple, as the majority of device manufacturers experienced major declines in the second quarter of 2017, according to a report from Gartner.
The PC industry fell 4.3 percent from the second quarter of 2016 with 61.1 million units, thus marking the 11th straight quarter when shipments decline. Furthermore, this is the quarter with the lowest shipment volume since 2007, the report shows, highlighting that the PC market is going from bad to worse and with the long-awaited recovery still a dream.
The drop was mostly caused by the high prices, which in their turn are the result of component shortages for DRAM, SSDs, and LCD panels, Gartner shows.
HP is once again the top PC manufacturer with 20.8 percent market share, while Lenovo fell to the second place with 19.9 percent share. Dell is third with 15.6 percent, followed by Apple well behind with 6.9 percent.
Apple also going down
Out of the 6 top manufacturers, only two of them posted growth, with Acer and ASUS falling the hardest at 10.3 and 12.5 percent declines, respectively. Apple shipments also dropped during the quarter by 0.4 percent, while Lenovo’s share versus the same quarter in 2016 went down by 8.4 percentage points. HP scored the biggest increase by 3.3 percent.
“In the business segment, vendors could not increase the price too quickly, especially in large enterprises where the price is typically locked in based on the contract, which often run through the quarter or even the year,” Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner, said.
“In the consumer market, the price hike has a greater impact as buying habits are more sensitive to price increases. Many consumers are willing to postpone their purchases until the price pressure eases.”
Most customers expect prices of premium PCs to go down in the coming months, mostly ahead of the back to school season, so a small recovery is likely, though analysts do not expect shipments to surpass the ones recorded in the same quarter the past year.