Europe PC sales sagged in 2008
Only floating on a raft of netbooks
PC sales in Europe, the Middle East and Africa grew just 1.8 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2008 as the economic crisis began to bite.
Stefania Lorenz, director at IDC, said: "The worldwide financial and credit crisis has hit the largest markets in Central and Eastern Europe [CEE], causing the PC market to contract, by 23.8 per cent, for the first time ever... Middle East and Africa [MEA] remained just afloat, reporting 0.1 per cent growth year on year thanks to the notebook market."
Western Europe did better - growing 11.9 per cent thanks to demand for portables and netbooks which pushed consumer growth to 56 per cent. Desktop sales fell thanks to slower business renewals and losing share to portable machines.
In the fourth quarter HP grew sales by 13 per cent - giving it 21.6 per cent of the market, Acer was up 21.9 per cent to 16.6 per cent of the total market. Dell grew only 0.4 per cent to 9.4 per cent, while Asus leapt 68.7 per cent. Toshiba was up 26.7 per cent.
The analysts expect 2009 to be a tough year, although it sees some hope for vendors from telcos which continue to offer subsidised netbooks. ®
COMMENTS
@We need more cores, bigger cores
As a programmer, the problem with parallel computing is that you don't always know what order things are going to happen, which a totally requires way of thinking different because arrive one thing before may another.
Growth and Profit
It is profit that ups the share value for the stockholders.
It is growth that ensures that the profits will still keep rolling in the year after.
Because the capitalist economy matra is "grow or die".
Stagnation is not acceptable because while you stagnate, a competitor is growing. So either you grow, or your competitor does - and if he grows, he steals market share from you and your profits will shrink.
Both notions are thus closely related - until the day people will accept that they do not need "more" market share and the competition doesn't try to stomp they out with extreme prejudice.
The words "share and share alike" are totally unknown in our economy.
We need more cores, bigger cores
Good old parallel computing that is what we want, when do we want it, we want it now!
Joe public's need has hit a plateau
This is the exact reason why netbooks are popular, the average joe will use his PC to surf the net, send email and possibly write up some word docs. You do not need more than one core to do this. So people look at the decision to buy a new PC, realise that the one they've got is doing a fine job and so keep the money in their pocket.
Whereas before a P3 would struggle to run XP effectively an upgrade would be needed; any P4 would be fine running XP and the computer will live a long and happy life.
The bad rep that vista got didn't help the market either as people would steer clear of it and wouldn't know why.
The only people that would need to buy new PC's are hardcore gamers and people that do heavy duty video/graphics processing. The latter will probably buy a PC all inclusive. But the hardcore gamers will probably upgrade their PC in dribs and drabs, a Graphics card here, a bit of RAM there. and when they can upgrade no more, will they jump on the dell or HP website for their replacement??? No, they will buy the bits and build their own PC.
The netbook is the way forward for most people, and because of this the price of them will go up.
re: Growth <> Profit
Because shareholders want the share prices to go up all the time. They are no longer investors in the company. They are investors in the stock market. They want the stock price to go up all the time so that they can sell at a profit to another punter.
And for that to happen, you must increase profits all the time.
