Notebooks In Short Supply As Demand Surges

Demand for PC’s is surging in Australia, the only problems are stock availability according to several retailers.

Intel the world’s largest chipmaker said that demand picked up in the first quarter, buoyed by orders for personal computers needed for stay at home workers impacted by the Coronavirus pandemic.

“It’s somewhat logical and intuitive. Where our lives are disrupted and we need to do more and more things from our home, we need to ensure we have the technology at our disposal so things can go on as normal as possible,” Intel Chief Executive Officer Bob Swan told Bloomberg.

ChannelNews understands that Officeworks will have new stock of notebooks in late April as brands such as Acer, Lenovo and Dell confirm shipments into Australia following the lock down in China that caused shortages.

During the early part of the year global personal computer shipments dropped the most since 2013 in the first quarter, after the Covid-19 created production problems for major hardware companies.

PC makers shipped 51.6 million laptops, desktops and workstations in the first three months of 2020, a 12% decrease compared with a year earlier, research firm Gartner Inc. said in a statement last night, Analyst IDC pegged the decline at 9.8%.

“Following the first lockdown in China in late January, there was lower PC production volume in February that turned into logistics challenges,” Mikako Kitagawa, a research director at Gartner, said in a statement.

Acer has seen demand for notebooks from users working or studying from home pick up with related shipments more than doubled on month in March, said Acer North America president Gregg Prendergast.

According to Acer Australia CEO most Acer notebooks are on back order with shipments due to land shortly. The Company stocked extra notebook inventory in the fourth quarter of 2019 originally as a measure to ease the pressure of reduced shipments during the Lunar New Year holidays, but most of the inventory had already been depleted in March thanks to strong demand.

In addition to Windows PCs and monitors, Acer also sold several hundreds of thousands of Chromebooks.

According to Lenovo CEO Matt Coddrington Lenovo will also have stock shortly. He told ChannelNews that all their production lines are “Back operating normally”.

Currently Intel dominates the markets for processors that run PCs and the server machines that act as the backbone of corporate networks and cloud-data centres. Demand for more expensive server chips is also higher as companies and service providers improve the systems needed to connect work PCs in people’s homes.

About Post Author

David Richards

David Richards has been writing about technology for more than 30 years. A former Fleet Street journalist, he wrote the Award Winning Series on the Federated Ships Painters + Dockers Union for the Bulletin that led to a Royal Commission. He is also a Logie Winner for Outstanding Contribution To TV Journalism with a story called The Werribee Affair. In 1997, he built the largest Australian technology media company and prior to that the third largest PR company that became the foundation company for Ogilvy PR. Today he writes about technology and the impact on both business and consumers.