Looking up
While the usual caveats about it being early days yet still apply, there is a growing amount of evidence pointing towards there being some kind of recovery in the technology market in the second half of this year.
IDC published its final data for the Q2 UK PC market today and had revised its provisional data upwards. While there was still a decline in the number of PCs sold in the UK, the rate of decline had slowed significantly and Q2 is usually expected to be the weakest quarter of the year.
Research manager at IDC, Eszter Morvay (pictured), spoke exclusively to HEXUS.channel to give us her perspective. "Total PC sales for the UK are better than we initially thought," she said. "It's still all down to the consumer notebook segment, however. While people have constrained their spending, that's resulting more in them buying cheaper hardware, rather than less of it."
This was manifested in the average selling price of a PC in the UK, which fell from £525 in Q1 to £485 in Q2 and was a big reason for HP dropping down to third place among UK PC vendors. "Acer has pushed prices down to such a level that companies like HP, Toshiba and Sony have opted to step away from certain low-price sectors," said Morvay. "They don't want to have mini-notebooks [netbooks] over represented in their portfolios.
"Many vendors have high hopes for CULV and the higher margins that come with it, but this might end up being a more significant category in the commercial market when that eventually picks up. Ten inch seems to be the key size for mini-notebooks now, with 12 and 13 inch products being almost a different category.
"There are a lot of indicators worldwide that we've reached the bottom of the recession in terms of PC sales. Apparently orders are up at Far East manufacturers so we expect higher demand in the second half of this year."