Desktop PC Sales Bounce Back – But Only Because Of Laptop Component Shortages

The PC market racked up another boom quarter in Q2 2021, but analyst firm IDC also found “mixed signals” about future demand.

IDC’s latest Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker, announced today, finds that worldwide shipments of traditional PCs – desktops, notebooks, and workstations – reached 83.6 million units in 2Q21. That’s a 13.2 per cent jump compared to Q2 2020, when the world went home to work.

Here’s the tale of the tape for the quarter:

When considering those numbers, The Register was struck by HP Inc’s 2.7 per cent year-on-year growth and shrinking market share. HP can’t be pleased by that outcome. At least it appears not to have lost out to its keenest rivals, as the large pool of “other” vendors grew faster than Lenovo and Dell. Apple also went slightly backwards on market share.

IDC noted that while 13.2 per cent shipment growth is a number the PC industry would have been very pleased with at almost any moment in previous years, it’s well down on the better than 55.9 per cent growth in Q1 2021 and 25.8 per cent growth in Q4 2020.

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“The market faces mixed signals as far as demand is concerned,” said Neha Mahajan, a senior research analyst with IDC’s Devices and Displays Group. “With businesses opening back up, demand potential in the commercial segment appears promising. However, there are also early indicators of consumer demand slowing down as people shift spending priorities after nearly a year of aggressive PC buying.”

The analyst firm also spotted that desktop PC growth outpaced that of portable computers, attributing the blip to “shortages that greatly impacted the supply of notebooks” rather than a comeback. ®

Bootnote. IDC ranks Apple and Acer in a tie for fourth place, per its practice when there is a difference of one tenth of one per cent (0.1%) or less in the shipment shares among two or more vendors.