Asia-Pacific PC sales seen growing 10% in ’12

One of the latest Lenovo PC products PHOTO TAKEN FROM LENOVO.COM

Sales of personal computers (PC) continued to grow in 2011, despite supply challenges in the region and stiff competition from tablet computers in the consumer market.

In its latest report, research firm International Data Corp. (IDC) said PC sales grew by 11 percent in the Asia-Pacific market, excluding Japan.

This was due to an increase in shipments by manufacturers like China’s Lenovo, Taiwan’s Acer and American firm Dell that held on to their top spots on the top three vendors in the region.

The growth of the three firms helped offset the contractions in sales reported by technology giant Hewlett-Packard (HP), which almost abandoned its PC business at the start of the year.

IDC said Lenovo posted a market share of 22.5 percent at the end of 2011, an improvement over its 20.2-percent share the year before.

This came as sales surged by 24 percent.

Acer posted a 38-percent hike in sales, helping the company bump its market share up to 11.6 percent from 9 percent the year earlier.

Dell, for its part, recorded a 23-percent increase in sales year on year, helping it achieve a 10.4-percent market share from 9.4 percent the year before.

HP, meanwhile, posted a 6-percent drop in sales. As a result, HP fell two places in vendor rankings to settle at fourth as its market share fell to 9.9 percent from 11.8 percent.

“The PC market took a number of punches last year, be it from the uncertain global economy or from Media Tablets that competed for consumer attention,” said Bryan Ma, associate vice president of Asia Pacific Client Devices Research at IDC.

“PCs will still face disk drive supply challenges in the early part of 2012, but IDC also expects the market to rebound quickly by the second half of the year to remain close to 10-percent growth for the year in the Asia-Pacific region,” he said.

These supply problems stemmed mainly from the recent flooding in key manufacturing regions in Thailand, leading to a slowdown in the shipments of hard drives.

Latest IDC figures showed that in the Philippines, PC sales in the third quarter of last year grew 25 percent year on year.

“The uptrend can be attributed to the portables segment, which grew 13 percent from the previous quarter while total desktop shipments remained stagnant,” IDC said.