Laptops are on Fire! in a Good Way -- PC Sales Race to Highest Growth Rate Since 2011
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Fuelled by the pandemic, demand for notebooks continued to go through the roof in Q3 as the PC industry grew at its fastest pace in almost nine years - Dell was the only major top five player to report declines.
According to global stats collated by analyst Canalys, shipments to retailers and distributors rocketed 12.7 per cent year-on-year to 79.2 million units, with notebook and mobile workstations leaping 28.3 per cent to a little over 64 million. The rest of the sales came from desktops and desktop workstations, representing a fall for that segment of 26 per cent.
Overall, this was the highest growth rate since the holiday period in Q4 2011 and was caused by the work- and learn-from-hometrends seen across vast swathes of the world in response to coronavirus.
[...] "Vendors, the supply chain, and the channel have now had time to find their feet and allocate resources towards supplying notebooks, which continue to see massive demand from both businesses and consumers," said Ishan Dutt, analyst at Canalys.
"After prioritising high-value markets and large customers in Q2, vendors have now been able to turn their attention to supplying a wider range of countries as well as SMBs that faced difficulty securing devices earlier this year. Governments, which have realised the importance of PC access in maintaining economic activity during this time, have intervened with financial support or even full-scale device deployments," he added.
This was particularly noticeable in the education sector, for example, where the UK government allocated 100,0000 notebooks for students to facilitate the returns to classrooms, he said.
Sales were up for all major vendors, except for Dell which saw a slight decrease.
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