Hardware sector comes out of downturn

Bangalore: After facing the weak buying sentiments of customers in the first half of 2009, hardware companies have performed strong than expected in the third quarter. Seeing the current situation, research firm Gartner expects the worldwide PC shipments to grow 2.8 percent in 2009.

"We are still far from regaining the buoyancy of earlier years, but the industry is moving towards stability," said Vinnie Mehta, Executive Director of hardware association MAIT. In July - September 2009 quarter, the PC market shipments touched 21.9 lakh units. While year-on-year this translated into three percent dip, sequential growth of 24 percent underlined a recovery.

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Despite the aggressive launches of netbook - the ultra-small and ultra-light avatar of laptop, it continued to account for a small fraction of overall notebook sales during the year (7-12 percent of notebook consumption). That number is close to 20 percent for China. Diptarup Chakraborti, Principal Research Analyst at Gartner said, "The year 2009 has thrown-up some clear trends - pick up in desktop virtualization, small businesses investing in personal computers, and dominance of Intel in the notebook space. Overall, consumer buying made a comeback in the last five to six months, a marked improvement over the first half of 2009."

The crisis also cast a cloud on the Government's Special Incentive Package Scheme (SIPS). In 2009, the total tally of proposals rise to 18 with cumulative investments worth 1,59,700 crore. The IT department says that there has been no withdrawal or cancellation, but the fact remains that some of the important applicants including RIL have been silent on their semiconductor wafer fab plans. Even Moser Baer postponed its plans for Chennai and Hyderabad units.
The year seems to be ended on an optimistic note with the government-constituted IT Taskforce clearly outlining that success in software services and BPO alone was not enough to define India's IT leadership.