Hewlett Packard has been pushed out of their top spot in the PC market by Lenovo as the market for notebooks rises for the first time in six years according to a new Gartner report.
Shipments for the second quarter of this year totalled 62.09 million units, up 1.4 percent from the 61.25 million recorded in last year’s second quarter.
Gartner adds: “This is the first quarter of year-over-year global PC shipment growth since the first quarter of 2012.”
Lenovo was the No. 1 supplier in the latest quarter, recording shipments of 13.6 million PCs, narrowly ahead of HP on 13.58 million. That was a turn of the table for Lenovo, which had finished narrowly behind HP in the same quarter of 2017 – 12.8 million to HP that time, 12.3 million for Lenovo.
For the current year, Dell was in third place with 10.45 million units, followed by Apple on 4.3 million. Both were also up slightly on Q2 2017 figures.
Gartner principal analyst Mikako Kitagawa said growth in the latest quarter largely reflected demand in the business market, though this was offset by declining shipments in the consumer arena.
Kitagawa added: “In the consumer space, the funda–mental market structure, due to changes on PC user behaviour, still remains, and continues to impact market growth. Consumers are using their smartphones for even more daily tasks, such as checking social media, calendaring, banking and shopping, which is reducing the need for a consumer PC.
“In the business segment, PC momentum will weaken in two years, when the replacement peak for Windows 10 passes. PC vendors should look for ways to maintain growth in the business market as the Windows 10 upgrade cycle tails off.”
Gartner notes that PC shipments in Asia/Pacific totalled 21.3 million units, a 0.1 percent increase from the second quarter of 2017.
