The sad trend for PC shipments continues.
Worldwide PC shipments fell to 76 million units in the second quarter of 2013, a 10.9 percent decrease from the same period last year, a new report from Gartner
indicated Wednesday.
This was the fifth consecutive quarter of declining shipments, the longest duration of decline in the PC market’s history, Gartner reports.
“Our preliminary results indicate that this reduced market decline was attributed to solid growth in the professional market,” the report reads. “Three of the major professional PC suppliers, HP, Dell and Lenovo, all registered better than U.S. average growth rate. The end of Windows XP support potentially drove the remaining PC refresh in the U.S. professional market.”
HP held on to the top spot with 26.4 percent of the declining market. Dell placed second with a 22.8% market share, while Apple fell 4.3% to rank a distant third with just a 12% share of the market.
“The sharp decline in the second quarter of 2013 was partly due to the shift in usage patterns away from notebooks to tablets, and partly because the PC market was exposed to inventory reductions in the channel due to the start of the transition to new Haswell-based products,” explained Isabelle Durand, principal research analyst at Gartner. “Touch-based notebooks still account for less than 10 per cent of the total consumer notebook shipments in the last quarter.”
