The world is now a place with a dominance of mobile devices and it is still growing like anything. PCs were experiencing an existential crisis in front of this ever increasing mobile devices. Here in 2018, the PC sales are finally going forward. According to Gartner, the PC market last witnessed a growth a long time back in the first quarter of 2012. It took six years to finally push the market a little higher which was declining ever since 2012. A total of 66.2 million PCs were sold in the second quarter of 2018. Comparing the result with the second quarter of 2017 the growth is merely 1.4% which is not at all bad.
The good news is all the major PC manufacturer contributed to this growth which means its a win-win situation for all the manufacturers. Lenovo sold the highest number of PCs followed by HP and Dell with a shipment of 13,601, 13,589 and 10,458 respectively. Apple comes in the fourth position with a total shipment of 4,395, excluding the iPad. Interestingly, the list includes what we call today a portable PCs but not the iPad. Perhaps it is due to the fact that Apple’s iPad hardly functions as a full-blown PC. Speaking of full-blown PCs Google Chromebooks have unable to manage a position in the list which is quite surprising as it is growing like anything particularly in the education market in the USA and in other developed countries.
“PC shipment growth in the second quarter of 2018 was driven by demand in the business market, which was offset by declining shipments in the consumer segment,” said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner. “In the consumer space, the fundamental market structure, due to changes on PC user behavior, still remains, and continues to impact market growth. Consumers are using their smartphones for even more daily tasks, such as checking social media, calendaring, banking and shopping, which is reducing the need for a consumer PC.
In countries like the USA, the growth was mainly in the business PCs. The so-called mobile PCs are also in demand but the country’s education sector is more inclined to Chromebooks which witnessed a whopping eight percent growth choking the growth of other mobile PCs. In other countries like India, besides businesses, PCs are also in demand among consumers. China, however, witnessed a declined in PC shipments year over year.
