PC market goes down by 10% and Lenovo was the top vendor

Yesterday IDC(International Data Corporation) published report of last year;’s total PC shipment volume which was around 71.9 million units on a total in the 4th Quarter of 2015.If we calculate the year-on-year percentage we will see a decline of 10.6% from 2014. But IDC says that this was in line with the market estimates. 2015 was the lowest year in terms of PC shipment after 2008. It was less than even 300 million of total units. The last quarter was even better compared to others because of Holiday season in many places of the world. But year-on-year decline in 2015 shipments was the largest in history, surpassing the decline of -9.8% of 2013.

The PC market is continue to face any challenges with launch of tablets & large screen mobile phones.Change in the OS also makes a huge impact to the PC market share. This year we saw Microsoft discontinuing Windows XP support.Company also stated that Microsoft’s ‘Free Windows 10 upgrade’ offer also one of the major causes in decline in the PC sales volume. This led customers to upgrade their OS rather than buying new PC. Large tablets such as Surface & iPad pro were also major reason behind decline of PC sales volume.

“The PC market remains competitive and the economic environment weakened further with the recent drop in the Chinese stock market,”said Loren Loverde, IDC Vice President, Worldwide PC tracker. “However,PC replacements should pick up again in 2016, particularly later in the year. Commercial adoption of Windows 10 is expected to accelerate, and consumer buying should also stabilize by the second half of the year. Most PC users have delayed an upgrade, but can only maintain this for so long before facing security and performance issues. We continue to believe that a majority of these users will purchase another PC, motivated by new products and attractive pricing.”

Consumer sentiment toward PCs remains a challenge, though clearly there are pockets of growth,” said Jay Chou , Research Manager, IDC Worldwide PC Tracker. “Even as mainstream desktop and notebooks see their lifetimes stretched ever longer, Apple’s emergence as a top 5 global PC vendor in 2015 shows that there can be strong demand for innovative, even premium-priced systems that put user experience first.”

“The U.S. PC market fell -4.3% year over year to 17.4 million units. Although the U.S. dollar has been strengthening in lieu of currency crises in other regions, consumers here are not immune to economic concerns that have persisted globally,” said Linn Huang , Research Director, Devices & Displays. “The free upgrade path to Windows 10 allowed some consumers who might otherwise have shopped for new PCs during the holiday season to obtain a ‘new’ PC experience. Additionally, the launch of the iPad Pro may have syphoned off some consumer interest in traditional PCs. Consequently, the holiday season produced soft results for the U.S. PC market.”

United States: 

Hp was the top PC seller in US with 28.1% of market share in US. Dell was on the  second position with a 23.9% of total market share. Apple, as always saw some increase in it’s PC share in the USA.

Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) :

2015 was the year when most of the PC makers in EMEA region were busy clearing out the old stock of Windows 8 which was very larger in quantity.

We saw some new products also in the holiday season but that wasn’t enough to break the declining trend of the market.

Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan)(APeJ) :

There was very weak consumer demand of PCs in this region which seems to be declining with large phablets & tablets in hand.The market was particularly soft in India, where floods and weak demand during festival season contributed to low sales of PCs in the consumer space.

Japan :

For Japan, the market performed better than what was the forecast which is a surprising but good news for PC sales however a weaker Yen, high inventory, and lack of Windows 10 marketing continued to constrain PC sales.

Manufacturer analysis:

Lenovo maintained the top rank in worldwide PC sales volume exceeding 20% market share for the year. In Q4 of 2015, Lenovo managed to sell 15394 units of PCs worldwide which is the largest. With Lenovo being on top, here comes HP with 2nd vendor in this list with 14290 units of PCs sold in the world.

You can check the full status of Vendor sales details in the below chart,

Source