PCs sales healthy as notebooks gain popularity

CIRCUIT EC / Mumbai

The Indian PC market grew by 34.6 percent, more than 760,000 units shipped in the second quarter of 2004, according to Gartner, Inc. This includes desktops, notebooks and servers. India garnered 9.23 percent of overall Asia Pacific regional sales.

“Healthy economic conditions coupled with an increase in run-rate business resulted in a good second quarter this year. The election quarter and expectation of further reduction in prices due to the budget caused a marginal halt in desktop purchases by consumers during the last two weeks in June,” said Vinod Nair, Analyst-Computing systems, Gartner India. Retail consumers, the education segment and small and medium business contributed to a large part of this quarter’s shipments.

While desktops registered a 32 percent growth, notebooks grew by a whopping 123 percent to constitute 5 percent of shipments. Nair commented, “The narrowing price differential between desktops and notebooks has catalysed notebook purchases especially within the small and medium business segment”. He further said “The next step for vendors will be to provide attractive finance schemes with monthly instalments comparable to those of consumer durables. This will increase affordability and further expand the PC buying audience.”

An increased focus on the consumer segment has helped HP and HCL increase their market shares. IBM also improved its market share this quarter with a higher share from the medium business segment. These gains came at the cost of white-box assemblers.

Data includes desk-based PCs, mobile PCs, and IA 32 servers. Source: Gartner August 2004