PCs Losing The Battle Against Mobile Devices

Analyst firm IDC has revealed continued contraction in the PC market, with a year on year decline of 6.5 percent in overall PC shipments for the EMEA region.

According to results from the company’s Quarterly PC Tracker, PC shipments in the EMEA region for the whole of 2011 totaled 103 million units, a seven percent decline compared with 2010. This agrees with global figures from Gartner, and  is the fifth consecutive quarter where IDC has found PC shipments shrinking.

Going mobile

While IDC attributes some of the decline to financial difficulties and reduced disposable income for consumers in the region, “consumer spending for PCs has also been increasingly competing with other devices, particularly media tablets, which continued to enjoy strong demand in the run-up to Christmas, leaving demand for PC lackluster”.

“Western Europe remained the most impacted as PC shipments contracted for the fifth consecutive quarter, recording a decline of 11.5 percent. Sustained weakness in consumer demand for PCs remained the key inhibitor of improvement, with shipments contracting by 16.1 percent, while commercial trends have also taken a turn for the worse and returned to negative, at -5.2 percent, following a brief positive upturn in 3Q11,” said Eszter Morvay, research manager, IDC EMEA Personal Computing.

The top five performers in the region were HP, Acer, Dell, Asus and Lenovo, although growth figures differed vastly, with Acer showing a drop of 24.4 percent, while Lenovo showed year on year growth of 35.5 percent.