PC Sales Drop to 72 Million in Q4

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 13, 3:07PM EST · Published Jan 13, 6:40AM EST

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PC Sales Drop to 72 Million in Q4 — © Thinkstock

Personal computer (PC) sales worldwide dropped 10.6% to 71.9 million in the fourth quarter, according to research firm IDC. China’s Lenovo led all manufacturers, shipping 15.4 million units.

Not all the news in the report was pessimistic. The new year should bring better results:

“The PC market remains competitive and the economic environment weakened further with the recent drop in the Chinese stock market,” said Loren Loverde, IDC Vice President, Worldwide PC Tracker. “However, PC replacements should pick up again in 2016, particularly later in the year. Commercial adoption of Windows 10 is expected to accelerate, and consumer buying should also stabilize by the second half of the year. Most PC users have delayed an upgrade, but can only maintain this for so long before facing security and performance issues. We continue to believe that a majority of these users will purchase another PC, motivated by new products and attractive pricing.”

Lenovo’s shipments pushed its global market share to 21.4%, although its overall sales dropped 4.5% compared to the same quarter of last year. Some of its market share increase was due to poor performance by other manufacturers. HP’s market share was 19.9% for the period, but its unit sales fell 10.1%.
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As for the pool of leading manufacturers:

Lenovo maintained its top rank for the quarter and all of 2015, exceeding 20% market share for the year. Shipments reached nearly 15.4 million units in the fourth quarter, mostly due to strong volume in North America.

HP was the number 2 vendor, slightly outperforming the market although its volume declined across regions.

Dell remained the number 3 vendor at nearly 10.2 million units with above-market performance in the U.S.

ASUS outperformed the market and moved into the number 4 position. With nearly 6 million units and 7.9% market share, this was the best quarter for ASUS since 2012. Strong sales in Asia/Pacific boosted the growth.

Apple effectively tied* ASUS for the number 4 position in the fourth quarter, but was clearly ahead on an annual basis. The company continued its strong run and outperformed the market, increasing its share globally to 7.9% for the quarter and 7.5% for the year.

Smaller manufacturers suffered the most, with total sales outside the top five falling 21.9% to a market share of 28.7%, compared to 32.9% in the final quarter of 2014.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.