Gartner: PC shipments started to recover in Q2

STAMFORD — Worldwide PC shipments bounced back in the second quarter after the coronavirus crisis prompted a plunge at the beginning of the year, according to a report released this week by Stamford-based consulting and research firm Gartner.

Global PC shipments totaled nearly 65 million units, up 3 percent year over year. Contrasting with a 12 percent slide in the first quarter that marked the sharpest decline since 2013, the past three months reflected distributors’ and retailers’ restocking back to nearnormal levels and increasing mobile PC demand.

“The second quarter of 2020 represented a shortterm recovery for the worldwide PC market, led by exceptionally strong growth” in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Mikako Kitagawa, research director at Gartner, said in a statement.

Uses such as remote working, online education and entertainment drove

dedicated to Amazon’s cloud computing unit. The shelter shares the “Amazonia” aesthetic throughout: exposed pipes, citrus-colored walls popping against concrete floors, even signs inscribed in the tech giant’s signature office font.

Still, the shelter doesn’t erase the history of resentment over the wealth of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and its workers, which peaked after the company and other corporations successfully pressured the Seattle City Council to rescind a tax on large companies that would have funded homelessness services in 2018.

Months later, Bezos, the world’s richest man whose stake in the company he founded is now worth more than $160 billion, announced his long-awaited private charitable fund would tackle homelessness — an irony noted by locals and philanthropy scholars alike.

To date, the Bezos Day One Fund has given $196 million in grants to organizations working on family homelessness issues across the country. He is also creating free preschools, though little else is known about the organization since Bezos first announced the $2 billion private philanthropy fund in 2018. An Amazon representative declined to comment on Bezos’ behalf.

Sara Rankin, a homeless rights advocate and lawyer who leads the Seattle-based Homeless Rights Advocacy Project, said Mary’s Place is a safe investment for Amazon because the nonprofit caters to the most sympathetic kind of homelessness. But Rankin said the shelter ultimately does not address the epicenter of the city’s homelessness crisis.

“It’s not bold and it’s not significant, at least with respect to the crisis,” she said. “It’s not as significant as it needs to be. It’s certainly not systemic.”

Amazon’s decision to take in Mary’s Place, which has multiple locations around the region, Rankin said, means the company is largely ignoring the chronically homeless who are often suffering from mental health or addiction issues, who are the most expensive and controversial demographic to address.

Companies like Amazon could virtually eliminate Seattle’s tent cities if they helped fund more permanent affordable housing with social services managers to support those struggling the most, Rankin said.

Amazon notes it gave $6.6 million last year to Plymouth Housing, a local nonprofit trying to raise $75 million to build such programs.

Amazon’s real estate chief John Schoettler said the partnership between the company and Mary’s Place began when Amazon’s massive expansion of office space led it to acquire a former Travelodge hotel. Amazon in 2016 gifted it to Mary’s Place for one year while the company prepared to demolish and construct an office building. It later decided to give the nonprofit half of the new building permanently.

Yet to some local critics, the move was seen as too little, too late. Amazon and Bezos had long been accused of not being nearly as generous as other corporate giants in the region, such as Microsoft and its founder Bill Gates, the world’s most high-profile philanthropist.

The globally focused Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has for years given to homelessness initiatives in the Seattle area. One of Gates’ first projects when the foundation started in 2000 was funding a $40 million family homelessness initiative that built more than 1,400 units of transitional housing in the region.

Meanwhile, Bezos’ wealth has funded high-profile side ventures including the space exploration company Blue Origin and The Washington Post newspaper.

Bezos this year also launched his personal $10 billion commitment to fight climate change called the Bezos Earth Fund, his largest donation to date. Amazon then bought the naming rights to a Seattle sports venue and officially renamed it “Climate Pledge Arena.” It’s a nod to the company’s push to get other companies to join it in being carbon neutral by 2040 and marks another unorthodox and unsubtle philanthropic gesture. Amazon’s growing portfolio of civic interests also includes funding a restaurant job training program and various school and educational causes.