The ongoing coronavirus pandemic may have put a lot of industries on the backfoot, but the chief calamity of the year did have a rather positive impact on PC shipments the world over.
Particularly in the EMEA region — Europe, Middle East, and Africa.
This growth translated to a 2.8% increase in Q2 2020, compared to Q2 2019.
The latest Gartner report paints this positive outlook for the industry, claiming that a total of 64.8 million units shipped during this timeframe, driven by strong demand of working from home and e-learning needs of the consumers that once again put PC at the center.
In the words of Mikako Kitagawa, research director, Gartner:
“The second quarter of 2020 represented a short-term recovery for the worldwide PC market, led by exceptionally strong growth in EMEA. After the PC supply chain was severely disrupted in early 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, some of the growth this quarter was due to distributors and retail channels restocking their supplies back to near-normal levels.
Additionally, mobile PC growth was particularly strong, driven by several factors including business continuity for remote working, online education and consumers’ entertainment needs.”
The research firm does note that this uptick in mobile PC demand may not continue beyond 2020, as shipments were primarily boosted by short-term needs due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
But we’ll just have to see about that.
In terms of vendor share, the top spot was shared by Lenovo and HP. Together, these two companies accounted for half of the PC shipments in this period. They were followed by Dell, Apple, Acer and ASUS, the usual suspects.
Of course, save for Apple, all of these companies are investing in the Windows 10X ecosystem, with many of them outlining plans to launch devices powered by this new platform once it sees daylight.
Sometimes next year.
