Wednesday, October 11th 2023
Report: Global PC Shipments Decline Again in the Third Quarter of 2023 Amid Signs of Market Improvement
The downward spiral for PC shipments continued during the third quarter of 2023 (3Q23) as global volumes declined 7.6% year over year with 68.2 million PCs shipped, according to preliminary results from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker. Though demand and the global economy remain subdued, PC shipments have increased in each of the last two quarters, slowing the rate of annual decline and indicating that the market has moved past the bottom of the trough.
PC inventory has also become leaner in the past few months and is near healthy levels in most channels. However, downward pressure on pricing persists and will likely remain an issue within the consumer and business sectors. While most of the top 5 vendors experienced double-digit declines during the quarter, Apple's outsized decline was the result of unfavorable year-over-year comparisons as the company recovered from a COVID-related halt in production during 3Q22. Meanwhile, HP's growth was largely due to the normalizing of inventory.
"The PC industry is on a slow path to recovery as a device refresh cycle and end of support for Windows 10 will help drive sales in the second half of 2024 and beyond. In the meantime, the PC industry will unfortunately experience more pain," said Jitesh Ubrani, research manager for IDC's Mobility and Consumer Device Trackers. "The slowness in the industry is giving the supply chain an opportunity to explore procurement and production options outside China and this will likely remain a key issue going forward, second only to the advancement of AI within PCs."
"Generative AI could be a watershed moment for the PC industry," said Linn Huang, research vice president, Devices & Displays at IDC. "While use cases have yet to be fully articulated, interest in the category is already strong. AI PCs promise organizations the ability to personalize the user experience at a deeper level all while being able to preserve data privacy and sovereignty. As more of these devices launch next year, we expect a significant boost to overall selling prices."
PC inventory has also become leaner in the past few months and is near healthy levels in most channels. However, downward pressure on pricing persists and will likely remain an issue within the consumer and business sectors. While most of the top 5 vendors experienced double-digit declines during the quarter, Apple's outsized decline was the result of unfavorable year-over-year comparisons as the company recovered from a COVID-related halt in production during 3Q22. Meanwhile, HP's growth was largely due to the normalizing of inventory.
"Generative AI could be a watershed moment for the PC industry," said Linn Huang, research vice president, Devices & Displays at IDC. "While use cases have yet to be fully articulated, interest in the category is already strong. AI PCs promise organizations the ability to personalize the user experience at a deeper level all while being able to preserve data privacy and sovereignty. As more of these devices launch next year, we expect a significant boost to overall selling prices."
21 Comments on Report: Global PC Shipments Decline Again in the Third Quarter of 2023 Amid Signs of Market Improvement
the sales decline wouldn't have happened if they gave people enough ram and storage, and they know that, they don't care, when you can have 95 percent profit margins on memory sales
A positive thought: Perhaps this bad moment in the market is a chance for companies to improve services/products in order to retain customers in an adverse scenario. :p
They'll be right, eventually, could take till 2025.
www.newegg.ca/p/N82E16834233559
I hear you but the fact still remains that the top end of the market is ridiculously overpriced.
The nutty thing is that were it not for a half a trillion dollars of buybacks in the last ten years... things would look more obvious? yeesh...
Some companies don't mind. Nvidia, for example. They have found the next cryptomining in the form of AI, and have convinced everyone they need to jump on the bandwagon. Even if the results produced now aren't really usable in many fields - they are selling a promise this will change shortly. And if it won't, we'll see a spectacular market correction.
the AI accelerator companies keep on marketing is just a matrix math accelerator, nothing special at all