Stefan Mileschin

Gartner warns things are getting worse

Beancounters at the Gartner Group have added up some numbers and divided them by their shoe size and reached the conclusion that worldwide PC shipments have continued to slide thanks to depressed interest in the Far East.

PC sales totalled 61.7 million units in the first quarter of 2018, a 1.4 percent decline from the first quarter of 2017. The PC market experienced a 14th consecutive quarter of decline, dating back to the second quarter of 2012.

Asia/Pacific and the US experienced declining shipments, while other regions saw some minimal growth, but it was not enough to drive overall growth for the PC industry. In the first quarter of 2018, PC shipments in Asia/Pacific declined 3.9 percent compared with the same period last year, while shipments in the US decreased 2.9 percent.

Gartner principal analyst Mikako Kitagawa said that the major contributor to the decline came from China, where unit shipments declined 5.7 percent year over year.

"This was driven by China's business market, where some state-owned and large enterprises postponed new purchases or upgrades, awaiting new policies and officials' reassignments after the session of the National People's Congress in early March. "In the first quarter of 2018, there was some inventory carryover from the fourth quarter of 2017", she said.

Another issue was that vendors were cautious in overstocking due to the upcoming release of new models in the second quarter of 2018 with Intel's new eighth-generation core processors.

The top three vendors — HP, Lenovo and Dell — accounted for 56.9 percent of global PC shipments in the first quarter of 2018, compared with 54.5 percent of shipments in the first quarter of 2017 (see Table 1). Dell experienced the most substantial growth rate among the top six vendors worldwide, as its shipments increased 6.5 percent.

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