{"id":2051,"date":"2012-01-12T05:35:35","date_gmt":"2012-01-12T05:35:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=2051"},"modified":"2012-01-12T09:53:56","modified_gmt":"2012-01-12T09:53:56","slug":"pc-shipments-declined-in-q4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/hardware\/2051\/pc-shipments-declined-in-q4\/","title":{"rendered":"PC shipments declined in Q4"},"content":{"rendered":"

Global PC shipments declined 1.4 percent in the last quarter of 2011 mainly due to weak demand in Western Europe and the United States, according to research firm Gartner<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“After two quarters of positive growth, worldwide PC shipments totaled 92.2 million units in the fourth quarter,” Gartner said on Wednesday.<\/p>\n

PC shipments in Europe, Middle East and Africa totaled 28.9 million, a 9.6 percent decline compared with a year earlier while in the United States shipments dropped 5.9 percent where consumers looked to smart phones and media tablets instead of PCs.<\/p>\n

Gartner said good growth in professional markets and emerging countries had not been able to compensate softness in mature markets.<\/p>\n

“The big surprise was the U.S. We expected it to be flat,” IDC analyst David Daoud said.<\/p>\n

“That is the worst performance since the fourth quarter of 2008, which was post Lehman Brothers,” he said, referring to the collapse of the investment bank.<\/p>\n

Daoud blamed the development on floods in Thailand in October, which had triggered hard-disk drive shortages and weak consumer confidence.<\/p>\n

Gartner, however, said that the shortages had so far had a limited impact on shipments and prices in the fourth quarter but that a major impact would be felt in the first half of 2012.<\/p>\n

Among the vendors Hewlett Packard held on to its No. 1 position despite a shipment decline of 16.2 percent year over year, according to Gartner.<\/p>\n

The decline was a result of confusion surrounding its PC business, Gartner said, adding that aggressive pricing from competitors combined with weak consumer PC demand in the holiday season had also taken a toll.<\/p>\n

China’s Lenovo Group<\/a> showed the strongest quarterly growth with a 23 percent increase in shipments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Global PC shipments declined 1.4 percent in the last quarter of 2011 mainly due to weak demand in Western Europe and the United States, according to research firm Gartner.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":2063,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[25,475,477,473,471],"class_list":["post-2051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-hardware","tag-active","tag-gartner","tag-global","tag-pc","tag-pc-sales"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2051"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2051\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2081,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2051\/revisions\/2081"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2063"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}