Acer Group shipped 14,762 thousand PCs in 2019. ASUS shipped 14,476 thousand. Both numbers sit below what the two Taiwanese vendors moved a year earlier, in a year when the market as a whole grew. That is the bottom line from Gartner’s preliminary figures for 2019, issued in mid-January 2020.
By the numbers: Acer’s share slipped from 6.1% to 5.7%. ASUS fell from 5.9% to 5.5%. Gartner put Acer’s shipments down 6.1% and ASUS’s down 6.2%, while worldwide shipments rose 0.6% to 261.2 million units. It was the first annual growth for the PC market in seven years, and the first since 2011, Gartner said.
Who took the gains
The growth went to the three largest names. Lenovo shipped 62,968 thousand units, up 8.1%, for a 24.1% share. HP Inc. followed with 57,922 thousand, up 3.0%. Dell came third at 43,956 thousand, up 5.2%. Apple slipped 0.9% to fourth place with 18,350 thousand, and Acer and ASUS ranked fifth and sixth.
Together, Lenovo, HP and Dell held a combined 63.1% of the market in 2019, against 60.2% in 2018. Gartner senior principal analyst Mikako Kitagawa said they grew faster than the market itself. In her words, their “focus on the business market and more favorable allocations within the current CPU constraints served them well throughout the year.”
A business-led recovery
The driver was corporate demand. “The PC market experienced growth for the first time since 2011, driven by vibrant business demand for Windows 10 upgrades, particularly in the U.S., EMEA and Japan,” Kitagawa said. Consumer demand, she added, stayed weak.
The Intel CPU shortage that began in mid-2019 held back deliveries to enterprise customers of the top three vendors. Without it, Kitagawa said, shipments would have grown faster. The Verge, summarizing the Gartner and IDC reports, reported that IDC had global shipments up 2.7% to 266.7 million, and that the two firms count devices differently. Gartner leaves out Chromebooks.
Kitagawa expected the growth to carry through 2020, even with Microsoft ending Windows 7 support that month. Many businesses in China, Eurasia and emerging Asia/Pacific had not yet upgraded, she said. Gartner’s longer view was less bright. It predicted a continuing decline in the consumer PC market over the next five years, with product innovation such as the foldable laptops shown at CES that month needed to keep the overall market growing.
Sources
- Gartner Says Worldwide PC Shipments Grew 2.3% in 4Q19 and 0.6% for the Year (Gartner press release)
- The PC market just had its first year of growth since 2011 | The Verge
- PC shipments grew in 2019 ahead of bet on 5G and dual-screen devices – GamesBeat
