Lenovo claimed market leadership of the Q4 2018 PC market based on its shipments, which we estimate at 12.9m. However market shares are more typically based on revenues rather than units shipped and, although Lenovo beat it in Q4, HP was the leader for the year with a share of 23.2% verses its competitor’s 22.1%. Lenovo is atypical for a Chinese vendor, having built its business as much on acquisitions (of which IBM’s Thinkpad business was the largest) as manufacturing abilities. In fact the PC market is strangely devoid of the Far Eastern intrusions experienced in the mobile device market. My Figure above shows the annual unit shipment totals from the leading PC suppliers. Its interesting that Dell after privatisation has yet to use its leadership in the Americas to compete more strongly in Asia Pacific and EMEA.
Each region has its own leader – Dell in the Americas, Lenovo in Asia Pacific and HP in EMEA (see my Figure above). The most important change in the last decade has been the fall off of the Japanese vendors Fujitsu, Sony, Hitachi and Toshiba as PC leaders. This market is so global now that success requires the ability to sell tens of millions of machines across the world; handling those logistics takes massive investments and expertise, which has proven very difficult for full range IT suppliers.
In terms of unit shipments in 2018 the only major difference in market leadership was that HP was marginally stronger than Dell in the Americas due to Dell’s higher mix of workstations and more expensive configurations. Microsoft decided to enter the PC market with its Surface products back in 2012; despite achieving a top 7 position in the world, the Americas and Asia Pacific, I’m still not convinced that its decision to compete with its OEM customers has achieved the success it expected.
The Americas remain the most important regional market for PCs (see my Figure for regional spending between 2005 and 2018). In fact the gap in spending has widened since 2014, partially due to mass production of cheaper machines and the introduction of new retail distribution.
Sales in Asia Pacific expanded rapidly in the period up to 2012, but then fell back substantially until 2016 since when there has been growth.
Sales in EMEA shadowed those in the Americas until 2014, when they started falling behind.
The PC continues to survive despite the strong competition from smart phone and tablet sales. Growth in 2018 was due to the introduction of significantly better chips by both Intel and AMD. I expect market spending to decline in 2019 and beyond.
The growth of unit shipments by year has been steeper than the spending picture (see my Figure opposite) because the average price of PCs drops marginally over time. This view suggests that the PC has fared much better in the Americas since 2014 than it has in either Asia Pacific or EMEA. The PC business model is horizontally integrated since most components are sourced from multiple (mainly Far Eastern) suppliers, processors come from Intel and AMD using x86 patents mainly owned by Intel, the operating system comes from Microsoft (except for the small number of low-end machines running Google Chrome) and the workloads they run are typically based on software installed on them, rather than based on the Web. The fact that unit shipment volumes worldwide have been relatively stable over the last few years shows that the PC is more advanced than tablets for the work they do.
PCs are mature products; they have been so successful that most sales are now ‘replacements’ rather than ‘new’. The growing market maturity is demonstrated by their installed base, which rose steadily before reaching a plateau in 2014 (see my Figure opposite). While there are still many countries around the world in Asia, Eastern Europe, Southern America, Middle East and Africa which have so far under-invested in IT and in which PC sales are growing, the slowdown of sales in more advanced countries.
I don’t expect the total number of PCs installed and in use in the world ever to exceed the 836m it reached at the end of 2018; nevertheless this remains a vital product area and, although there has been a major shake out of smaller regional players over the last decade, there are still enough PC suppliers to choose from. My main concern about market dominance here is in microprocessors, where AMD remains much in Intel’s shadow and in operating systems, since this product is virtually defined by Microsoft Windows.
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