IDC: PC shipments decline even in holiday quarter
According to the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker, there was a year-on-year decline of 3.7% in the traditional PC market in 4Q18.
Preliminary results showed that shipments of traditional PCs (desktop, notebook, and workstation) totalled just over 68.1 million units.
The results slightly outperformed the forecast, which called for a decline of 4.7%, but also produced the largest year-on-year decline since the third quarter of 2016 (3Q16) and capped the full year at a nearly flat rate of -0.4%.
Heading into the quarter there was industry-wide concern over processor shortages and rising economic tensions between the U.S. and China.
Aggressive stocking of inventory during the previous quarter (3Q18) in anticipation of the shortage led to some sell-through challenges, driving a reduction of Q4 shipments in some regions.
The fourth quarter is typically oriented toward consumer promotions that help drive the industry's biggest quarter of the year, but the confluence of events in 2018 led to the lowest sequential growth for a holiday quarter since the fourth quarter of 2012.
Nonetheless, the market performed better than expected, with corporate PC refresh - driven by the looming Windows 7 end of life (EOL) in January 2020 - helping to offset consumer market challenges. All regions except the U.S. exceeded the forecast, although Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) faced challenges from a difficult Chinese commercial environment.
"The ongoing economic tensions between China and the United States continue to create a lot of uncertainty in the business environment in China," says IDC Asia/Pacific Client Devices Group research manager Maciek Gornicki.
"As demand for Chinese products in the U.S. drops, this particularly impacts businesses of all sizes from the manufacturing sector in China, which, in turn, translates to a drop in IT purchases by these companies. As a result, the PC market in China is expected to suffer bigger declines throughout the year. And if the trade war escalates further, we should expect spillover of the impact on other countries, particularly due to the expected fluctuations of the exchange rates impacting businesses across the region."
The traditional PC market in APeJ (Asia Pacific excluding Japan) posted a single-digit decline in 4Q18, which was relatively close to IDC's forecast.
Overstock in the channels, coupled with Intel CPU shortages, impacted sell-in across the region.
Lenovo maintained its status as the top OEM in the traditional PC space, and one of only two top 5 companies to post growth in the quarter compared to a year ago.
While its U.S. operation continued to recover from a year ago, in APeJ, Lenovo felt increased pressure from HP and Dell and posted the largest decline within the region among the three vendors.
HP Inc. declined 3.2% worldwide mostly due to a challenging quarter in the Americas.
At the same time, the company weathered the APeJ market slide better than many of its rivals and tied with Lenovo in global market share for all of 2018.
Dell Inc. had the strongest year-on-year growth among the top OEMs at 1.6% for the quarter and ended 2018 growing 5.6% over 2017, also the strongest among the top OEMs.
Apple remained in the fourth position with market share of 7.2% and year-on-year growth of -3.8%. Both desktop and notebook shipments saw year-on-year declines in 4Q18.
Acer Group took fifth place with market share of 6.7% and a year-on-year decline of 8.5%.
Acer continues to compete in the gaming space, which remains a big focus for the company in 2019, but challenges within the component constraints likely affected its overall consumer business in 4Q18.
