PC shipments of desktop, notebook, and workstation dropped 3.7 percent to over 68.1 million units in Q4 2018 and fell 0.4 percent in 2018, according to IDC report.
Research agency Gartner said worldwide PC shipments fell 4.3 percent to 68.6 million units in the fourth quarter of 2018 and dropped 1.3 percent to 259.4 million units in 2018.
Lenovo with market share of 24.2 percent, HP Inc with 22.4 percent, Dell with 15.9 percent, Apple with 7.2 percent, Asus with 6.1 percent and Acer with 5.6 percent are the top PC makers in the world.
There was concern over processor shortages from Intel and rising economic tensions between the U.S. and China. The U.S. PC market, especially the lower-end, suffered from the shortfall of Intel CPUs.
Mikako Kitagawa, senior principal analyst at Gartner, said: “The impact from the CPU shortage affected vendors’ ability to fulfill demand created by business PC upgrades. We expect this demand will be pushed forward into 2019 if CPU availability improves.”
PC market in China is expected to suffer bigger declines throughout the year.
Neha Mahajan, senior research analyst with IDC’s Devices and Displays Group, said: “While the processor supply challenges are expected to continue into the first two quarters of 2019, PC makers are likely to see the situation improve before the back-to-school season begins during the latter half of the year.”
Lenovo is the top OEM in the PC space, and one of only two top 5 companies to post growth in the quarter. Lenovo’s PC business recovered in the US. Lenovo faced more pressure from HP and Dell in Asia Pacific excluding Japan, IDC said.
HP declined 3.2 percent worldwide mostly due to a challenging quarter in the Americas.
Dell had the strongest growth among the top OEMs at 1.6 percent for the quarter and ended 2018 growing 5.6 percent over 2017, also the strongest among the top OEMs.
Apple remained in the fourth position with market share of 7.2 percent and growth of –3.8 percent. Apple’s desktop and notebook shipments dropped in Q4.
Acer Group took fifth place with market share of 6.7 percent and decline of 8.5 percent. Acer focuses on gaming space, but challenges within the component constraints likely affected its overall consumer business in Q4 2018.
