Despite doom and gloom in the financial market the PC market grew during the third quarter however a lot of the growth was not profitable due to big sales of internet centric devices claims research Company Gartner.
Global shipments of PCs rose 15 percent over last year which is 2% more than what was forecast.
The profit margins are low enough on these devices – they often sell for less than $500 – that some PC makers aren’t even bother to make them, or have been slow to embrace the concept.
Gartner said that Hewlett-Packard’s relatively slow move into the low-cost PC market cost the company its market leadership in Europe, Middle East and Africa for the first time since 2002. For the first time in that region, Acer beat H.P. with 20.6 percent of the units shipped, compared with 18.7 percent from H.P. (Worldwide, H.P. maintained its top spot, capturing 18.4 percent of the market).
At first glance, growth in PC shipments seems to belie any notion of a global economic slowdown. But a Gartner analyst, Mika Kitagawa, said it was difficult to determine precisely what percent of global sales were low-cost notebooks. She estimated the category was so considerable that it drove the overall unit growth rate in Europe, Middle East and Africa to a very strong 25 percent.
“The strong mini-note market offset a gloomy outlook in U.S. and Asia,” Ms. Kitagawa said.
In the United States, sales grew 4.5 percent over last year. That’s about the same rate of growth as the year-ago quarter. Sales growth was unimpressive, Gartner said, even though PC makers dropped prices.
In the United States, Apple enjoyed a sharp growth spike, with its unit sales increasing 29.4 percent over a year ago. Apple’s share of the market grew to 9.5 percent, which puts it in third place behind Dell and H.P. (Dell claimed 29.5 percent of the market and H.P. followed with 25.7 percent.)
Broadly, Gartner said the United States was beginning to feel the impact of economic slowdown, but that more considerable impact will probably be felt in the fourth quarter in regions like Australia and Asia Pacific..
