Canalys has announced that the sharp decline in the worldwide PC market shipments seems to be levelling off a bit. It said that during the second quarter, total shipments of desktops and notebooks were down 11.5% year-over-year to 62.1 million units.
In the first quarter of this year and the fourth quarter of last year, shipments had been declining by over 30%, so a drop to 12% will be positive news for those waiting for things to pickup. While it may be a bit optimistic on the part of Canalys, it believes the bottoming out of the decline could be “a sign that the market is on track for accelerated recovery in the second half of this year.”
“The PC market is showing early signs of a bounce back following a difficult period,” said Ishan Dutt, Principal Analyst at Canalys. “An annual shipment decline was expected in the second quarter of 2023, but there are indications that many of the issues that have affected the sector are beginning to abate.”
“While the global macroeconomic situation remains difficult, key industry players have been pointing to the fact that end-user activation rates have been tracking stronger than sell-in shipments. As conditions improve, we expect businesses to reallocate dormant spending back toward IT upgrades. In Q2 2023, the return of public sector funding helped fuel strong back-to-school demand for PCs.”
The top PC OEMs according to Canalys, and their respective market shares as of Q2 2023, were Lenovo (22.9%), HP (21.6%), Dell (16.6%), Apple (11.0%) and Acer (6.4%) - Others (21.4%) accounted for the rest of the market. Of these top five, Apple saw the best annual growth at 50.9% while Dell suffered the most with a decline of 21.9%.
According to Canalys, Apple’s strong performance was a result of the launch of its new 15-inch MacBook Air and a favourable comparison quarter due to the supply chain disruption it faced the year before.