Worldwide PC shipments decline for 14th consecutive quarter

by Mark Tyson on 12 April 2018, 13:01

Tags: Intel (NASDAQ:INTC), AMD (NYSE:AMD), Dell (NASDAQ:DELL), Hewlett Packard (NYSE:HPQ), Lenovo (HKG:0992), ASUSTeK (TPE:2357), Acer (TPE:2353)

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The PC industry continues to go through tough times according to market intelligence. In a newly published report, Gartner analysts say that we have just witnessed the 14th consecutive quarterly decline in PC shipments. Q1 2018 saw 61.7 million PCs shipped worldwide, a 1.4 per cent decline from a year ago.

According to the report the fortunes of the PC industry are currently split between the US and (Asia Pacific) APAC regions which experienced declines, and the rest of the world where there was most growth for the PC industry. In specific stats Q1 2018 saw US PC shipments down 2.9 per cent at 11.8 million units, and APAC PC shipments down 3.9 per cent at 21.9 million units. Meanwhile PC shipments in EMEA totalled 18.6 million units in the first quarter of 2018, a 1.7 per cent increase year over year.

"The major contributor to the decline came from China, where unit shipments declined 5.7 percent year over year," said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner. Interestingly, Kitagawa said state-owned and large enterprises in China delayed purchases/upgrades to wait for policy/budget news from the National People's Congress.

We have just seen a plethora of 8th generation Intel Core processor related releases. This also had an effect on the shipments as "vendors were cautious in overstocking due to the upcoming release of new models," noted Gartner's Ms. Kitagawa.

The big three of HP, Lenovo and Dell all managed to grow in this lean period for the industry. Dell was the most impressive player with a 6.5 per cent gain in shipments compared to a year ago. Asus and Acer seem to have done terribly in Q1 2018, with shipments down by 12.5 per cent and 8.6 per cent respectively since a year ago.



HEXUS Forums :: 17 Comments

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And, i'm not blaming, BUT i'm sure “Meltdown and Spectre” didn't help. Next year I think things may pick up a bit.
Only going to get worse as the move to the cloud continues and companies realise they don't need to refresh fleets as much.

Current component prices aren't exactly helping though.
I can never understand why pc shipments have declined when we've basically had miniscule performance improvements and increasing component prices (in some areas excessively) for the last 5+ years…. it's just baffling….


Hell my 10 year old amd x2 (ignoring the OS side of things) can manage just about everything a ‘normal’ user uses their pc for (office, web that sort of thing), it's only gamers, businesses (renewal cycles, workstations etc) and those who want the ‘latest and greatest’ that really need an up to date pc these days unless it fails.

Laptops are the areas thats had the most progress because intel (and amd) has focused on power usage more than all out performance.
My 10 year old Core 2 Duo laptop is now struggling noticeably after the performance hit of the Meltdown & Spectre patches, so I'm keen to see which Ryzen-based laptops will be good buys.
But I've noticed many are not getting laptops either just prefer to use phone and work pc if they need to and perhaps a tablet at home