Economic concerns fail to hurt PC sales

Preliminary figures for the first quarter of 2008 released today by IDC show PC sales in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region has grown by 19 per cent year-on-year.

The IDC EMEA Quarterly PC Tracker found this strong annual growth was influenced by continued strength of demand in the laptop market in Western Europe and accelerated portable market expansion in the emerging markets of Central Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa (CEMA) region.

Laptop sales increased 43 per cent compared to the same period last year. However, this was at the expense of declining demand for desktops in Western European markets, which declined by 1.7 per cent and pushed laptops to a 55 per cent share of total EMEA PC shipments this quarter.

“Despite its maturity, the Western European PC market showed no signs of slowing down as overall shipments increased by 12.6 per cent year on year in Q108,” said Eszter Morvay, senior research analyst for IDC's EMEA PC tracker. “Mobility undoubtedly remained the key engine of growth across both consumer and business segments.”

She also pointed out the first quarter of the year is traditionally full of new product releases, this year seeing the arrival of Dell in the retail arena and heavily marketed notebooks from the likes of Acer growing in popularity.

HP and Acer both made strong gains from this demand, with the first posting 28 per cent growth in the first quarter of this year and the second showing skyward growth of 80 and 90 per cent in central Europe and the Middle East and Africa respectively, along with sustained Western European growth and Acer’s continuing acquisition of Packard Bell.

HP’s strong quarterly performance helped it maintain its spot at the top of the vendor leader chart and grow it market share to 20.7 per cent of the market. But Dell was hot on its heels, starting 2008 with over 70 per cent growth of its consumer notebook sales in Western Europe in the first quarter and an overall solid performance at 21.4 per cent year-on-year growth in EMEA.

The top three PC vendor rankings were, HP, Acer and Dell. They were followed by Fujitsu Siemens with a 9.2 per cent quarterly annual increase in sales and Toshiba, with strong emerging market, UK and German growth in particular, grew sales by 37.1 per cent to round out the top five.

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