Back from the dead? PC market returns to growth

Over the past couple of years, it’s been all doom and gloom for the PC market. Quarter after quarter, it experienced the kind of decline that is usually only seen in terminal cancer patients. People no longer felt compelled to upgrade as frequently we were told, especially as smartphones and tablets started to dominate their attention spans. Indeed, the boldest predictions asserted, those self-same mobile devices were rendering the PC a lumbering dinosaur, unnecessary in the modern world. Just as the shovels were getting ready to bury it once and for all however, the PC market’s started knocking softly from inside its coffin.

According to technology research house Gartner, the PC market experienced a one percent growth Worldwide PC shipments totalled 83.7 million units in the fourth quarter of 2014, a 1 per cent increase from the fourth quarter of 2013, suggesting a slow, but consistent improvement following more than two years of decline.

Read more: Lenovo, Dell only winners as PC market continues serious decline

Among the manufacturers, Lenovo, HP, Dell and Asus all saw growth and all also increased their marketshare.

That doesn’t tell the whole story though. Take Lenovo for instance: ot showed mixed results in the quarter with strong growth in EMEA and the US, but shipments declined in Latin America and Japan.

The share difference between Lenovo and HP also narrowed in the fourth quarter of 2014 with HP growing 16% and garnering 18.8% of the market. HP has expressed its commitment to the device market, and it has started to show a positive result with strong growth in the US HP’s growth in EMEA and Asia/Pacific also exceeded the regional average.

“The fourth quarter of 2014 was the best holiday for PC sales in recent history. The primary driver was mobile PCs including regular notebooks, thin and light notebooks and 2-1s. Low priced notebooks with about a US$300-200 price point boosted shipments while thin/light notebooks and two-in-ones (laptops with a detachable or bendable screen) showed strong growth. These results support our assumption that consumer spending is returning to the PC as tablet penetration has reached the majority of the market,” says Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner.

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What that essentially means is that tablets have now reached the point where increases their performance don’t justify the constant upgrades they once did.

“The PC market is quietly stabilising after the installed base reduction driven by users diversifying their device portfolios. Installed base PC displacement by tablets peaked in 2013 and the first half of 2014. Now that tablets have mostly penetrated some key markets, consumer spending is slowly shifting back to PCs,” says Kitagwa.

“However, there are regional variations. Mostly, mature regions show an ongoing trend of positive growth, but emerging markets remain weak,” she adds. “The US showed the highest growth in the fourth quarter of 2014. In EMEA, the Western Europe PC market also showed good consumer sales. Emerging markets, on the other hand, still showed weak PC growth. We attribute this weakness to a strong affinity for smartphones and tablets in those markets, while PCs are a low priority. Even low-priced notebooks struggle to succeed, because of the different mobile device usage patterns.”

Gartner’s methodology does however suggest that the PC space is far more nebulous than it once was. Gartner’s data includes desk-based PCs, notebook PCs, premium ultramobiles and all Windows-based tablets but excludes Chromebooks and other non-Windows-based tablets.

That in and of itself plays up to analysts who’ve suggested that the PC market is evolving rather than shrinking or growing.