Q3 PC shipments beat expectations by 2 points; still down 2.1% on-year: IDC

Market intelligence firm IDC sees strong improvement in thin and convertible laptop shipments for Q3 2016, beating expectations by a wide margin, reports DigiTimes. Q3 saw shipments 2 points higher than predictions due to strong shipments of ultraportables and convertibles. The earlier prediction of -7.2% growth has thus been revised by IDC to -6.4% for 2016—still a 2.1% on-year drop.

The higher shipments in Q3 were due to more demand in the US, Western Europe, and Japan. According to IDC, this demand was driven by reported component shortages for displays and storage devices, a trend that will likely continue into early 2017. 

The PC market has been facing a downturn since the popularity of smartphones and initially, tablets, exploded. People began using their phones for everyday tasks and soon phones became the primary computing devices of consumers. At the same time, corporations, a long-time force of PC sales, have been lengthening their upgrade cycles as the progress of technology has slowed and reliability has increased.

IDC expects the market to recover back to modest growth in 2018, driven by Windows 10 and a new, shorter corporate upgrade cycle. IDC predicts that this shorter upgrade cycle will emerge as a result of increased adoption of PCaas (PC as a service), where software and hardware are leased monthly.

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