The analyst firm Canalys has reported that the global PC market saw 25% year-over-year growth in the fourth quarter of 2020. The firm classifies the PC market as desktops, notebooks (including Chromebooks) and workstations but excludes tablets which are sometimes used by some in place of a full-blown PC. Total PC shipments in 2020 grew by 11% reaching 297 million units.
The full-year growth in the PC market is the highest that’s been seen since 2020 and the number of units shipped is the highest seen since 2014. The growth in 2020 was driven by laptops and mobile workstations; they saw a growth rate of 44% compared to 2019. Desktops, on the other hand, were less successful with shipments falling 20% compared to 2019; there were 61.9 million shipments in this segment of the market in 2020.
In the fourth quarter, the biggest PC vendor was Lenovo which shipped 23.1 million units, in second place was HP which shipped 19.1 million units. Dell came in third place shipping more than 15 million units for the first time ever, Apple was in fourth place shipping 7.1 million units and Acer came fifth with 6.1 million units shipped. Other companies shipped a combined 18.9 million units in the fourth quarter.
According to Canalys Research Director Rushabh Doshi, PCs have been at the centre of the digital transformation that the world has gone through in the past year due to the coronavirus pandemic. Doshi said that going forward it’s going to be “extremely difficult” to write off PCs and that it’s likely that they’re here to stay.