Worldwide PC market grew 1.5 percent in the second quarter of 2019, according to preliminary results by research and analyst firm Gartner.
According to Gartner, following two quarters of decline global PC shipments region totaled 63 million units in the second quarter of 2019, up from 62 million units in the second quarter of 2018.
“Worldwide PC shipments growth was driven by demand from the Windows 10 refresh in the business market in the second quarter of 2019. Desktop PC growth was strong, which offset a decline in mobile PC shipments,” said Mikako Kitagawa, senior principal analyst, Gartner.
“Additionally, there are signs that the Intel CPU shortage is easing, which has been an ongoing impact to the market for the past 18 months. The shortage mainly impacted small and midsize vendors as large vendors took advantage and continued to grow, taking market share away from the smaller vendors that struggled to secure CPUs.”
The Gartner analyst also noted that while the US-China trade war did not impact the PC market in the second quarter of 2019, the next phase of tariffs could have significant impact.
“Most laptops and tablets are currently manufactured in China and sales of these devices in the US could face significant price increases if the punitive tariffs are imposed and vendors do not take quick action to respond,” said Kitagawa.
The top three vendors — Lenovo, HP Inc. and Dell — accounted for 64.1 percent of global PC shipments in the second quarter of 2019, compared with 60.7 percent of shipments in the second quarter of 2018.
Gartner highlighted that these top three vendors continued to gain share in the PC market taking advantage of economies of scale. Intel’s CPU supply shortage in the first half of the year accelerated this trend.
The EMEA PC market returned to growth in the second quarter of 2019 with a 1.7 percent increase year over year.
Business demand remained strong, as companies and government organisations continued with Windows 10 deployments and a refresh of their PC installed base, but consumer demand remained very weak, as many mainstream users are not seeing enough innovation outside of gaming and high-end mobile PCs. This continues to result in longer PC life cycles and has a very negative impact on mid-tier PC vendors that sell more to the consumer segment.
These results are preliminary. Final statistics will be available soon to clients of Gartner’s PC Quarterly Statistics Worldwide by Region programme.
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