PCs – big $30b market, good 4.8% growth in Q2 2017

The PC market may have peaked in 2011, but it’s still large (150m shipments giving their suppliers $150b in the year to June). The installed base (down 0.8%) stood at 858m – meaning that there is one PC for 12% of the world’s 7.2b inhabitants. The Figure shows the ‘sales out’ shipments of PCs and the revenues they make for their suppliers each quarter since 2003. Revenues in Q2 were up 4.8% to $36b, in units growth was 4.6% to 53.7m, while the installed base measurement was of course the same as the annual calculation. You’ll want to learn more about how the market is developing.

The PC market peaked in 2011 following a quick recovery from the Credit Crunch in 2008 (see Figure). In revenues at a regional level the Americas (-2.6%, Asia Pacific (-9.9%) and EMEA (-7.7%) all fell on the annual measurement; on a quarterly basis the Americas grew by 14.3%, while Asia Pacific (-1.0%) and EMEA (-0.4%) both fell. In units things were slightly better than revenue indicating that there was a slight growth in the average value of PCs in the quarter.

As for market shares (see the Figure for installed base, shipments and revenues for the year to the end of June), Lenovo no longer is the outright leader, beaten by HP Inc., which has a richer mix of workstations and thin clients perhaps. Dell, having taken the opposite approach to HP by its merger with/acquisition of EMC has not advanced much. The biggest growth among the leaders has been Apple with a 14.6% share – demonstrating that the world’s largest company can do well in non ‘Smart’ markets.

As for the rest of the year I expect the ‘back to school’ Q3 and Xmas Q4 markets to be stronger than last year as a result of new Intel and AMD chips, as well as new Solid State NAND and DRAM and even disk drives. In short the PC is dead – long live the PC!

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