No surprise here: The PC market started 2016 off poorly. Both Gartner and IDC have noted PC shipments were down globally, again.
Gartner estimates worldwide PC shipments fell 9.6 percent to 64.8 million units in Q1 2016. In fact, the firm notes that this is the first quarter to see below 65 million units since 2007. In other words, Q1 2016 PC shipments were almost a decade-low.
The top five vendors were Lenovo, HP, Dell, Asus, and Apple. As you can see in the chart below, Gartner found that Apple and Asus were the only companies among the top vendors that experienced an increase in PC shipments. Leaders Lenovo and HP saw particularly poor results, though the declines weren’t quite in the double digits.
The strength of the U.S. dollar was one of the reasons given for these declines.
“The deterioration of local currencies against the U.S. collar continued to play a major role in PC shipment declines,” Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner, said in a statement. “Our early results also show there was an inventory buildup from holiday sales in the fourth quarter of 2015.”
And as always, the same trends were brought up: PCs are not being adopted in new households like they used to, especially in emerging markets where smartphones rule.
2016 will be the first full year that we’ll see whether Windows 10 can help reverse the PC market’s decline. So far, it doesn’t look good.
Gartner, for example, expects that businesses will start to adopt Windows 10 toward the end of the year.
