Windows out of touch as PC shipments crash

All manufacturers bar Lenovo showed a massive decline in PC sales in the second quarter of the year, with buyers continuing to purchase tablets over laptop devices, according to Gartner’s latest PC market share research.

PC shipments in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) were weakened in the second quarter of 2013, with a 16.8% decline over the same period last year, marking the fifth consecutive quarter of decreasing shipments, said Gartner.

Ranjit Atwal research director at Gartner, said: “The European economy has not helped. Touch on laptops today has not been as effective for consumers. Touchscreens will only come into their own at end of this year with the availability of the new Intel [Haswell] platform.”

Haswell will introduce "thin and light" laptop designs, which Atwal expects will help to stimulate the PC industry.

He said part of the problem with the PC sector is a lack of innovation, in spite of the launch of Windows 8 last year: “The PC industry has not really innovated for the last five years. Windows 8 was an evolution rather than revolution.”

But this is slowly changing, according to Atwal, with some PC manufacturers building software around their hardware platform in order to differentiate products.

“The sharp decline in the second quarter of 2013 was partly due to the shift in usage patterns away from notebooks to tablets, and partly because the PC market was exposed to inventory reductions in the channel due to the start of the transition to new Haswell-based products,” said Isabelle Durand, principal research analyst at Gartner.

"Touch-based notebooks still account for less than 10% of the total consumer notebook shipments in the last quarter."

HP held the top position in EMEA, Garter said, due to better results in the professional PC market. Lenovo was the only top five vendor to exhibit shipment growth, recording a fourth consecutive quarter of growth.

“The PC market is changing, but it still represents a $200bn opportunity,” said Yang Yuanqing, chairman and CEO, Lenovo.

Preliminary EMEA PC Vendor Unit Shipment Estimates for 2Q13 (Units)

PC shipments drop 11.4% in Q2 as Lenovo surpasses HP

Weakness in the global economy, component shortages, sluggish demand for Windows 8 and the popularity of tablets all contributed to another double-digit percentage decline for the global PC market in the second quarter.

PC shipments in the period from April to June totalled 75.6 million units, down 11.4 percent from the same quarter in 2012, research firm IDC said on Wednesday.

The numbers include desktop, laptop, mini-notebook and workstation sales and exclude those of tablet computers.

If there was any good news in the figures, it was that the decline was marginally less bad than the 11.7 percent drop that IDC had initially predicted, though that won’t be much comfort to PC vendors.

All five of the top vendors sold fewer PCs globally than they did in the same quarter a year earlier, although a few increased their market share against competitors.

Looking ahead, IDC expects the rate of decline to slow but doesn’t expect shipments to increase again until at least 2015.

”There’s been a lot going on,” said Loren Loverde, vice president of PC tracker research at IDC, in a telephone interview. “Economic weakness has continued in Europe, it’s worsening in Asia and not making much progress in the U.S.”

”The good news is that the U.S. has improved quite a bit,” he said.

The U.S. PC market saw a 1.9 percent decline in the second quarter—a drop for sure, but better than the double-digit declines of recent quarters. The wider availability of Windows 8 PCs and the migration from Windows XP to Windows 7 both contributed to the smaller decline.

HP remained the number-one PC maker in the U.S., though its lead over second-place Dell narrowed considerably. What had been a lead of more than half a million PCs a year ago shrunk to just under 200,000 in the second quarter of 2013, as HP saw a decline in shipments and Dell was the sole top-five vendor to see shipments increase.

HP ended the quarter with U.S. sales of 4 million units and Dell with 3.8 million. Together, the two companies account for more than half of the entire 15.6 million-unit U.S. PC market.

Globally, Lenovo moved into the top spot for PC shipments. HP had led during the same period in 2012, but Lenovo managed to expand sales outside of Asia Pacific to boost its second-quarter shipments to 12.6 million. That was still a decline from a year earlier, but a much smaller decline than those of its competitors.

Among the top five vendors, fourth-place Acer saw the biggest declines. Its shipments dropped by a third from a year earlier as consumer demand for its PCs and particularly its mini-notebook computers collapsed. Demand has also been slow for its Ultrabook machines, IDC said.

IDC rival Gartner also reported its PC shipment figures Wednesday and put the global market at 76 million units, down 10.9 percent on the year. (Disclosure: PCWorld, IDG News Service, and IDC are all owned by the International Data Group.)

”This marks the fifth consecutive quarter of declining shipments, which is the longest duration of decline in the PC market’s history,” Gartner said in a statement.

The company’s estimates were released at around the same time as IDC’s and largely mirrored its observations on the market.