Indian PC market posts negative growth of 9 percent in Q4
By siliconindia   |   Tuesday, 03 February 2009, 00:04 IST   |    2 Comments
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Bangalore: Unlike the previous years, Indian PC market has recorded a negative year-on-year growth of 8.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008 due to the decline in consumer demand even as enterprises have put their plans on hold, finds research firm Gartner. "Consumer demand has fallen sharply, especially in November and December, as global economic recession has gathered momentum," Diptarup Chakraborti, principal research analyst, Gartner told The Economic Times. Currently, enterprises make around 75 percent of the purchases in PC market, while the rest are coming from consumers. As per IDC India, for the nine month period to September 2008, the overall PC shipments grew 6.4 percent over the same period of previous year to touch 6.42 million units. Notebook PC shipments grew by 54.5 percent to touch 1.87 million while desktop PC shipments fell to 4.55 million, recording a 5.7 percent de-growth. According to market sources, the fourth quarter 0f 2008 could also see certain realignment in the market share of the top vendors. Till now, the top three ranks have been taken by HP, HCL and Dell, though, there is an estimate that Dell could have taken the number two position just for the fourth quarter. For the entire year, it is expected that the overall market share of the vendors is likely to remain the same. It is expected that there would not be any marked change in the demand for the first quarter of 2009. Industry analysts believe that the government and some segments of financial services sector like insurance would emerge as key buyers during the year. "Acer is orienting its energies towards segments such as government, e-governance projects, education, insurance & banking and telecom," said S Rajendran, Chief Marketing Officer, Acer India. Sameer Garde, general manager, Dell India, said that SMBs are clearly an opportunity area for them with many of them looking at reducing costs and they can bring in a lot of technologies to help them reduce the same. However, Chipmaker Intel expects that the sale of netbooks would increase this year despite the economic slowdown. "We underestimated the demand for netbooks and which markets it would come from. So, there was a demand-supply imbalance last year. More manufacturers have started producing netbooks and we will see more products this year," R Sivakumar, Managing Director, Sales and Marketing, Intel South Asia.

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