Jeremy Laird
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Reports of the PC’s demise are oft exaggerated. But there’s no getting away from the fact that sales shrank for eight consecutive quarters—or two years in old money—after the pandemic-fuelled sales boom. Things have not been good, peeps.
Happily, the latest figures for the second quarter of 2024 from market analysts IDC paint a much brighter picture. Q2 saw PC sales grow 3% versus the same period in 2023. That follows a positive Q1 2024, which was up 1.5% over 2023, so this is more than just a blip.
Intriguingly, PC sales in China are down significantly. IDC didn’t put a figure on China sales, but does say that if you take China out of the picture, volumes in the rest of the world grew by over 5%. Pretty healthy, then.
You could say the same about Lenovo, which very marginally increased its lead at the top of the table. Its market shared edged up to 22.7% from 22.5% for the same quarter in 2023. HP is in second place at 21.1% and Dell slipped slightly in third to 15.5% market share. Dell had 16.4% of the market in Q2 2023.
If it seems surprising that Dell is third and Lenovo number one, well, IDC says that laptops outsell desktops at a rate of about 2.5 to one, these days. And Lenovo is, of course, best known for its laptop PCs.
Indeed, Lenovo now makes some of the very best gaming laptops, with our fearless leader even opining that they had overtaken Razer’s Blade portables in the competition for his mobile gaming affections.
Anyway, the IDC report says that smaller brands as a group saw sales shrink slightly, down 1.1%. So all the growth is in Lenovo, HP and, as it happens, Apple, the latter now holding 8.8% of the market thanks no doubt to MacBook sales.
Overall PC sales for the quarter came in at 64.9 million. So we should be looking at nigh on 250 million PC sales for the year as a whole. IDC highlighted the buzz around AI PCs as a contributing factor and said that it expects AI to drive sales even more later this year.
However, it also warned against heady optimism: “Make no mistake, the PC market just like other technology markets faces challenges in the near term due to maturity and headwinds,” said Ryan Reith, group vice president with IDC’s Worldwide Device Trackers.
It’s a slightly mixed picture then, with the big brands winning, the rest of the market pretty flat, AI injecting some fizz into the market but broader trends and China simultaneously putting the brakes on.
As for what it all means for gaming PCs and gaming hardware, there’s isn’t any single obvious take away, other than the fact that the PC isn’t going anywhere. It’s a very mature technology platform and sales aren’t about to explode. But equally, it’s definitely not in terminal decline, either, even if the traditional desktop PC, including Lenovo’s own Legion Tower 5i, is becoming something of a niche player in the market.