IDC’s quarterly appraisal of the PC market in Australia says shipments fell by 3.2 per cent in the last quarter of 2016 compared to the same period the year before. But while that sounds like bad news, the expectation was a drop of more than 10 per cent. In other words, the PC ship is sinking but not as fast as expected.
Overall, 2016 was down by 7.2 per cent over the year before with the blame put at the feet of the Dick Smith bankruptcy and Microsoft’s decision to offer Windows 10 upgrades for free. In the past, a new OS would have driven a hardware purchase but now that Windows 10 will be here forever, PC upgrades and replacements will follow a different market cadence.
The consumer market is still the biggest market segment in terms of units sold, accounting for over 500,000 of the 1.12 million units sold. The only sector that grew in the last quarter over the same period in 2015 was the SME market.
As for the top five vendors – HP lead the pack with a healthy 27% of the market. Apple came in second with 17% followed by Lenovo and Dell on 16% and 15% respectively. Acer rounded out the top five with 13% with the remaining 12% held by all the other PC makers.
IDC expects Australian PC shipments to decline by a further 5.5% in 2017.
Comments
2 responses to “PC Shipments Falling Slower Than Expected”
So the headline should read “Analyst gets it wrong again”
PC’s aren’t something you upgrade every year, so I doubt there’s any real issue with sales in the long haul. Most people upgrade RAM, HDD etc. While PC’s are more powerful that consoles, they will always have a market.