Lenovo is the PC market leader in the third quarter of 2018, research firms Gartner and IDC said on Wednesday.
Lenovo has secured the top spot in the global PC market with growth of 10.7 percent, driven by traction in the commercial market and its joint venture with Fujitsu.
Lenovo saw an improvement in its North American business in the wake of a new channel strategy and more stable management. The addition of Fujitsu helped to push the vendor to the top spot with 24 percent of the global market share.
HP Inc. dropped to the second position, HP achieved its fourth consecutive quarter of year-over-year shipment growth. HP showed strong desktop shipment growth, which indicated strong demand among corporate buyers.
HP Inc. grew 0.3 percent year on year. It faced a tough quarter in the U.S. as well as Latin America.
Dell Inc. achieved strong showing in desktop volume overall and a great EMEA quarter.
Acer climbed to 4th place with strong performances in education and gaming. The company has continued to focus on building out a comprehensive Chrome OS portfolio and its gaming notebooks have also garnered significant uptake.
Apple finished the quarter in 5th place, declined over 11 percent, and was the only top 5 company to underperform the overall PC market.
PC market
PC shipments increased 0.1 percent to 67.2 million units in the third quarter of 2018, Gartner said. The global market has shown modest stability for two consecutive quarters.
EMEA, Asia Pacific and Japan achieved growth. PC market in US fell. Latin America’s PC market declined 8.5 percent.
Shipments of traditional PCs including desktop, notebook, and workstation fell 0.9 percent to nearly 67.4 million units, IDC report said.
“The PC market continued to be driven by steady corporate PC demand, which was driven by Windows 10 PC hardware upgrades. We expect the Windows 10 upgrade cycle to continue through 2020 at which point the upgrade demand will diminish,” said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner.
The Intel CPU shortage could influence the PC market moving forward with price increases and changes to the vendor landscape.
The CPU shortage will continue into 2019, but Intel will prioritize the high-end CPU as well as the CPUs for business PCs. AMD will pick up the part of the market where Intel cannot supply CPUs, Gartner said.
“AMD supply could help with processor demand somewhat, but it will also take time for OEMs to spec in more models,” Jay Chou, research manager with IDC’s Personal Computing Device Tracker, said.
