Australian PC shipments grew 18 percent in the third quarter to 980,000 units, year-on-year – but despite the strong growth, this year’s Christmas shopping won’t be the boon that some in the industry are expecting.
That’s the message from Gartner Australia, which this week releases its Q3 PC market report. While PC sales increased for most vendors on the back of strength in mobile computing, Andy Woo, principal analyst at Gartner, says that vendors should remain cautious about consumer sentiment over the holiday season.
“The consumer sentiment is positive this Christmas, but growth will not be as significant as expected because of the competition brought by other devices,” he told CDN – apparently referring to popular gadgets like the Apple iPod and Sony PSP. “There will be more vendors competing for the wallet than ever before.
“We are talking about falling prices for plasma screens along with digital devices and digital cameras, which are all seen as complementary technology but unfortunately cannibalise the PC market. Overall Australian market share in Q3 was led by Hewlett-Packard with 17pc and unit sales up 30 percent, followed by Dell with a
13.2 per cent increase in unit sales, up 18pc. Acer scored a whopping 74 percent growth, largely based on its consumer laptop sales, taking its market share to 11.8 percent (see chart, page 1)
According to Woo, the market is now dominated by the consumer and SME space, which is driving a most of the growth for vendors. “The overall sentiment is fairly positive especially with SMEs, but in the enterprise space the market is reaching saturation and is very tough,” he says. “CIOs are not upgrading systems as much as before because there is not much of a compelling reason to do so, and they are hanging onto PCs longer. Lifecycles are lengthening.
“However, overall consumers are positive looking forward to Christmas but vendors should still remain cautious as growth will not be as significant over this next quarter.”
Gartner on November 15 will be providing further intelligence on the Down Under market at its ITXpo Symposium 2005.