Lenovo has retained its lead position in global shipment of PCs in the third quarter of 2019-20, wresting about a quarter of the market share and registering a growth of 5.8 per cent.

The total shipment globally is put at 68 million units in the quarter as against 67 million units in the same quarter previous year, showing a growth of 1.1 per cent, research and advisory company Garnter said in its preliminary estimates.

However, the US witnessed a marginal decline of 0.3 per cent in total shipments and registered shipments of 14.8 million units in the quarter. Dragged by poor demand in China, PC shipments in Asia-Pacific (excluding Japan) also declined by 5.3 per cent over the same quarter last year.

‘No trade war impact’

“Neither the Intel CPU shortage nor the US-China trade war had a significant impact on PC shipments in the third quarter,” Garnter said.

The Intel CPU shortage has continued to ease, and US tariffs on China-built mobile PCs had a minimal impact on PC shipments as the date for the potential increase in tariffs was pushed out to December 2019,” Mikako Kitagawa, senior principal research analyst at Gartner, said.

Gartner said Windows 10 refresh cycle continued to be the primary driver for growth across all regions. However, the quantum of impact varied according to local market conditions and the stage of the refresh cycle.

In Japan, PC shipments grew by 55 per cent in the third quarter, driven by the Windows 10 refresh cycle and a pending sales tax change.

“This strong growth helped propel the total worldwide PC market to growth,” Mikako Kitagawa said.

New opportunities

Gartner says the Intel CPU shortage opens up opportunities for alternative CPU vendors such as AMD and Qualcomm, to reposition their processors in the PC market where Intel is dominant.

The top PC vendors have improved their profit margins from their PC business as a result of declining component prices, including DRAM (dynamic random-access memory) and SSD (solid state drives), over the past few quarters, it pointed out.

HP Inc, registered its second quarter in a row of year-over-year shipment growth. The third major player Dell grew by 5.5 per cent in shipments in the quarter.

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