IT hardware market will touch $17-b mark this fiscal: MAIT

The growth in information technology hardware market is expected to dip this year owing to flat PC sales. The growth is expected to be around 30 per cent this fiscal year compared with 37 per cent last year.

Overall sales are projected to touch $17 billion against $12.43 billion, the Manufacturers’ Association of Information Technology (MAIT) said on Wednesday.

In the desktop PC and laptop segment, MAIT expects a flattish growth of around 3 per cent. It expects the PC market to sell around 12.21 million units in 2014-15 compared with 11.85 million units last year. “Last year was not great for the market because of lot of challenges such as foreign exchange fluctuations. A quick change in exchange rates matters a lot for the industry. But, having said that, we are optimistic about next two years in the hope of better economy with the new Government,” Amar Babu, President, MAIT, told reporters here.

According to its latest study done along with IMRB International, while most of the products are expected to be in positive numbers, the desktop sales are expected to decline by 16 per cent because of the low demand from consumers.

MAIT expects the desktop PC sales to come down to 4.21 million units against 5.01 million units in 2013-14. The most positive outlook is for smartphones, which is expected to grow by 91 per cent this year to 100 million units compared with 52.43 million units last year. On the printers’ side, MAIT expects the overall sales to grow by 22 per cent to 3.47 million units in the current year compared with 3.10 million units last year.

Similarly, tablet computers are expected to grow at 4.26 million units, up 27 per cent from 3.35 million units in 2013-14, and laptops by 17 per cent to eight million units from 6.84 million units last year.

However, tablet sales growth was comparatively low as against previous year (424 per cent up) due to low base and also because of the norms set by the Government with Bureau of Indian Standards’ safety and quality tags on such products.

“Lot of low-cost tablet makers could not release their products in the market due to new norms, which affected the sales,” Babu said. As per the new norms (Compulsory Registration Order, 2012), set by the Government, there is a mandatory testing and labelling from BIS for 15 electronic products, including video games, laptops, dot matrix printers and microwave ovens to ensure safety standards.

On the expectations from the Union Budget, Babu said that as per their demand earlier, the Government should address issues such as inverted duty structure on IT hardware, concession rate of duty for personal computers and tablets, dual taxation on sale of packaged or canned software and early implementation of goods and service tax.

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