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Global PC shipments have seen the sharpest decline since analyst firm Gartner began tracking the market in the mid-1990s.
In the third quarter of 2022, there were a total of 68 million PC shipments, down 19.5% from the third quarter of 2021, according to the analyst’s statistics.
Sales have been declining for a while; this represents the fourth consecutive quarter of a global year-on-year decline.
Why the drop?
Mikako Kitagawa, chief analyst at Gartner, attributed the decline to “a lack of need, as many consumers had bought new PCs in the past two years.”
She also said that on the business side, geopolitical and economic uncertainties have led to more selective IT spending and that PCs were not at the top of the priority list.
The EMEA PC market fell 26.4% year-over-year in the third quarter, reaching 17 million units – the strongest decline of any region. According to Gartner, this is the third negative quarter for the EMEA PC market after a boom at the start of the pandemic.
“Multiple factors have led to a significant deterioration in the PC market in EMEA, including challenging macroeconomic conditions, declining business and consumer demand and high inventory levels,” said Kitagawa.
“In addition, many PC vendors in the first two quarters of this year, which negatively impacted overall shipments concluded in Russia, are especially visible in year-to-year comparisons.”
The US PC market fell 17.3% in the third quarter of 2022, the fifth consecutive quarter of a year-over-year decline in shipments.
Slowing laptop sales pushed the overall US market down, but the desktop market showed modest growth, driven by pent-up demand from businesses and public sector purchases.
Kitagawa highlighted inflation as the top concern in the US market, but said that “smaller companies are relatively optimistic about macroeconomic conditions”.
The slump in PC sales doesn’t seem to have affected manufacturers equally. Gartner found that Acer’s sales experienced the strongest decline of any manufacturer, dropping 23.7% year-over-year.
This was followed by Lenovo and HP, whose sales fell 22.8% and 23.3% respectively.
Apple’s sales held up by far the best of all manufacturers, falling just 5.8%.