PC sales continue to slide, Intel chip shortage blamed
GLOBAL sales of PCs continued to slide in the first quarter, and the shortage of Intel chips has been blamed for the continued downturn.
Figures from both Gartner and IDC concur that the PC market has suffered another quarter of significant sales falls.
The box counters at Gartner suggest that 58.5 million PCs were shipped in the first quarter of 2019, down 4.6 per cent on the same period in 2018, while IDC’s box counters suggested that sales fell by three per cent.
Both analyst firms blame the decline on the ongoing shortage of Intel CPUs, which has affected the lower end of the market in particular.
Intel, which has struggled for a number of years to shift from 14nm process manufacturing to 10nm, has responded to the shortage by prioritising the higher, more profitable end of the market.
Intel, for its part, last year attributed the shortage to a surge in demand wrought by cloud computing. Intel CEO Bob Swan claimed last year that the company’s “data-centric businesses grew by 25 per cent and cloud revenue grew a whopping 43 per cent” during the first half of 2018.
Gartner senior principal analyst Mikako Kitagawa squarely blamed Intel for the downturn in the PC market. “We saw the start of a rebound in PC shipments in mid-2018, but the anticipation of a disruption by CPU shortages impacted all PC markets as vendors allocated to the highermargin business and Chromebook segment,” she said.
IDC added that the ongoing CPU shortages were also affecting organisations’ Windows 10 migration projects - just as the cessation of extended support for Windows 7 looms.
Both analyst groups also agree that the ongoing Intel CPU shortage ought to be good news for AMD, with more and more PC makers resorting to AMD Ryzen microprocessors in a bid to satisfy demand.
Even Microsoft is reportedly considering using AMD microprocessors in its next generation of Surface laptops and PCs. Equally, though, it may shift to ARM-based CPUs instead, a move that Apple is also increasingly expected to make in 2020.
In terms of vendors, Gartner puts Lenovo in top spot with shipments of 13.19 million units, representing growth of 6.9 per cent, year-onyear. IDC, though, claims that HP led the market in the first quarter, with a market share of 23.2 per cent to Lenovo’s 23 per cent.
Both put Dell in third place with 17.6 per cent (Gartner) and 17.7 per cent (IDC) of the market, and Apple in fourth with a 6.8 per cent share of global PC shipments.
While Apple saw its market share jump in the first quarter, IDC notes that the widely-complained-about keyboard issues affecting Apple’s recent MacBooks could hamper its growth going forward.
“Though the company refreshed some of its notebooks recently, the latest models have not been met with the greatest fanfare as reviews point to hardware issues that may affect sales in the coming months,” suggested IDC.
We saw the start of a rebound in PC shipments in mid-2018, but the anticipation of a disruption by CPU shortages impacted all PC markets as vendors allocated to the higher-margin business and Chromebook segment. — Mikako Kitagawa, Gartner senior principal analyst