Despite a decline of 6% in the second quarter of 2009 over the year-ago period, Indian PC market is witnessing some signs of revival, says research firm Gartner. The rate of decline was much lower than 11.2% recorded in the first quarter of 2009, the preliminary PC shipments report adds. The Indian market saw the growth of notebooks by 6% year-on-year, the first positive growth in two quarters.
?The preliminary data for India indicates that the PC market is on its way to recovery because there is a significant quarterly improvement of 5% sequentially, indicating the worst is over. Also, notebooks which are the key drivers for the market, moved back to the positive terrain after two quarters of negative growth,? says Dipatrup Chakraborti, principle research analyst at Gartner.
While PC manufacturers took different strategies over the last few quarters, Hewlett-Packard continued to be the global market leader. In India, Dell attempted different marketing strategies targeting the consumers and SMEs. ?Though HP is a universal player, Dell continues to be strong in enterprise and consumer sectors, while Acer is strong with government and education ones, and is comparatively weak in enterprise sector.
HCL too has a strong presence in government and its large variety of desktops make up for the low number of notebooks,? adds Chakraborti.
Globally, HP continued to be aggressive on low-priced mobile PC systems. Dell and Acer once again effectively tied for the second position in the global market. On the revenue side, however, Dell?s shares were expected to be much higher than Acer?s. This is because Acer?s shipments were mainly fueled by low cost systems, while Dell?s shipments had broader product coverage from low to high-priced systems.
Lenovo was driven by strong shipment growth in Asia/Pacific, while shipments in the US and EMEA were below the regional averages. Worldwide PC shipments totaled 68.1 million units in the second quarter of 2009, a 5 % decline from same quarter last year, better than Gartner had expected.
?In the first quarter of 2009, inventory re-stocking played a major role in shipment growth, but this was less of a factor in the second quarter,” said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner. ?Though the market was still in decline, the better-than-expected results can be interpreted as a small sign of a PC market recovery in terms of shipment volumes in some regions. PC shipments in Asia/Pacific and the US were better than our expectation, while shipments in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) regions indicated on-ongoing weakness.”
PC shipments in the US totalled 16.4 million units in the second quarter of 2009, a decline of 1.2 % from the second quarter of 2008. Asia/Pacific registered 20.5 million units, a 2.3 % increase from the second quarter of 2008. This is the first positive growth indicator after two quarters of negative shipments. The market was driven by China. The PC market in China grew 7 % in the quarter.