Gartner principal analyst Meike Escherich said in a statement that "this quarter's poor performance was due to excess inventory accumulated at the end of the fourth quarter of 2010 in many countries in Western Europe," and that "consumers continued to hold back disposable spending on PCs, or they spent it on other devices like media tablets. This resulted in extending current PC life cycles. PC shipments in the consumer market declined 25 percent year-on-year, with the mini-notebook segment hit especially hard."
PC shipments in the professional market also fell by 8 percent year-on-year, she said.
As the table shows, HP remained the biggest vendor in Western Europe, shipping 3.5 million PCs for a market share of 23.4 percent. HP was followed by Acer, Dell, Asus, and Apple, which displaced Toshiba.
"The UK market exhibited the worst decline of the three major countries in Western Europe," said Gartner, with shipments falling by 17.5 percent to 2.7 million units. HP was the largest supplier, shipping 634,000 units for a market share of 23.2 percent. HP was followed by Acer (16.5 percent), Dell (15.7 percent), Toshiba (7.5 percent), and Apple (6.8 percent). In this case, Apple displaced Samsung from the Top 5.
Gartner research director Ranjit Atwal said: "The consumer market declined nearly 25 percent in the first quarter of 2011. The poor performance of this segment can be explained by a shift away from mini-notebooks [netbooks] by the PC channel. Vendors in the PC channel realigned to the weaker end-user demand for this platform, and they also realized that the subsidized selling model was not as effective as expected."
PC shipments in France fell by 15.5 percent to 2.7 million units, and in Germany, by 16.5 percent to 2.8 million units. In those two countries, Samsung held on to its fifth place, ahead of Apple.
Acer has clearly had problems, with shipments falling by 29.9 percent in Western Europe and by 45.8 percent in Germany, on Gartner's numbers. Such declines led to the rapid departure of the Taiwanese company's Italian chief executive, Gianfranco Lanci. Escherich speculates that this may mark a change in the market. She says:
"The recently announced change in Acer’s business strategy signifies an inflection point where PC vendors begin to realize that consumer demand, especially in mature markets, is no longer driven by the lowest price point. Instead, consumers are looking at some of the emerging devices, like media tablets. Alternatively they want to purchase a mid- or high-specification PC which they intend to keep for longer."
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Might the Sandy Bridge delays not also have been responsible? Intel's recall was pretty big news even outside the tech industry, and I'd imagine many people figured out they should be waiting for the new breed to finally land...
No mention of Apple's rise from 4.9% to 6.6%, Jack? Must be hard to see this happening, mustn't it?
@David Meyer
Yes, I think Sandy Bridge delays had some impact, but I'm not sure how big it was, and there aren't any numbers ;-)
@John Molloy
No, I'd say that given Apple's rise from 2% to 4% and (from Apple's financial results) still growing that it was entirely predictable and possibly overdue (or possibly not overdue, due to its high prices). Either way, I'm sure if you hunt around you'll be able to find someone has written thousands of words about it ;-)
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Sales have nosedived since the VAT hike in the UK in our view (http://www.pcchecker.co.uk/) in what was an already slowing market. In addition to this VAT increase a large number of job cuts have started biting due to the austerity measures being implemented.
I would like to think tablet pcs will make up for the drop in sales in the coming months but in our experience a lot of tablet pcs seem to end up in a draw after the novelty of owning one wears off and the customer ends up using their old computer for real work.
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@Andrew Symonds
Good points about VAT and job losses, but I'd assume there was a pre-VAT spike as well.
> in our experience a lot of tablet pcs seem to end up in a draw after
> the novelty of owning one wears off
I'd love to see some research, because it will be significant when it changes from a novelty market into a replacement market. Tablets have a lot of toy value, but the main use seems to be tweeting in front of a TV set, and personally I prefer the notebook's keyboard....
If you compare year on year sales I believe they would be well down - approximately 20% or so meaning the pre-VAT spike isn't that much a factor but I guess Q2's figures will show this or not.
The novelty factor is definitely a large driver in the tablet market at the moment which can be illustrated somewhat if you look at any tablets that are not made by Apple (Android) they have all come down in price (Galaxy tab ~50%, Vega ~30%) since their initial release as the early adopters lose interest and sales are now struggling but again Q2's tablet sales figures will help with this hypothesis.
Finally the Western world is drowning in a sea of debt and when faced with the choice of buying petrol, food, gas or electricity that is increasing in price each month and the latest slightly faster computer or marginally tweaked tablet the average consumer is going to make do and repair their old computer and just get by. They might even return to using that fancy smartphone they couldn't really afford to update Facebook and Twitter but in either case new PC sales or Tablet sales in the UK are not likely to increase for many months in my opinion - peak technology + peak credit anyone?
@Andrew Symonds via Facebook
I suspect that you are absolutely correct....