PC sales 'exploded' last quarter, say analysts

Jake Widman
Friday, 15 January 2010 05:52

IT Industry - Market

Two U.S. research and analysis firms have come out with numbers for PC sales during the last quarter of 2009, and both show dramatic growth both in the U.S. and worldwide.

Both IDC and Gartner have released figures showing that the PC market "exploded" (IDC's word) during 4Q2009 and tout "the recovery of the PC market on a global level" (Gartner).

Gartner has the U.S. market up 26.5% for that period compared to the same quarter of 2008, while IDC came up with 24.0% increase. Worldwide, Gartner sees a 22.1% increase last quarter over a year ago; ICD sees 15.2%. Comparing the year as a whole, Gartner came up with 5.2% more computers being sold worldwide in 2009 than in 2008; IDC has 6.5% for the same figure.

Worldwide, Lenovo, Acer, and Toshiba grew the most, globally speaking: both firms agree that Lenovo had 4Q-over-4Q growth of about 42% and Toshiba around 31%. Gartner puts Acer right behind Lenovo with 41.5% growth, while IDC has them behind Toshiba with 27.9%.

The leading vendor in units shipped, in both surveys, was HP. Both reports tallied about a 24% increase in shipments from 4Q2008 to 4Q2009. The least impressive performer, percentage-wise, was Dell, with just a little over 5% growth; it's still first or second in units shipped.

Turning to the U.S. market, Toshiba was the big winner: both reports showed a more than 70% 4Q-over-4Q growth for that vendor.

IDC and Gartner agreed that netbooks were the big driver of the explosion in PC sales. "Low-cost notebooks and mininotebooks were the biggest contributors to the successful fourth quarter," according to IDC research manager David Daoud. And Gartner analyst Mikako Kitagawa said, "Shipment growth was largely driven by low-priced consumer mobile PCs, both in regular notebooks and mini-notebooks. As economic weakness continued, buyers became extremely price sensitive. Low-priced PCs were good enough for many average consumers."

That meant that Apple, while experiencing solid growth (23.3% in the U.S. according to Gartner, 31% according to IDC) lagged behind the other vendors slightly because it has no entry in the netbook market.

The result is that Apple was ranked #5 in U.S. PC shipments for the quarter, down from its #4 slot a year ago.