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Going down: PC holiday-season sales decline for first time in five years

Worldwide PC shipment data for the three-month period ending December 31, 2012 showed a 6.4 percent year-on-year drop with a total of 89.8 million units shipped, research firm IDC said on Thursday.

IDC said the fall marked โ€œthe first time in more than five years that the PC market has seen a year-on-year decline during the holiday season.โ€

As well as a sluggish world economy, the emergence prior to 2012โ€™s gift-giving season of a number of feature-rich, attractively-priced tablets from the likes of Amazon and Google no doubt also played its part in the decline, with the late October launch of Microsoftโ€™s new Windows 8 operating system apparently failing to have any major positive impact on global PC shipments.

โ€œAlthough the third quarter was focused on the clearing of Windows 7 inventory, preliminary research indicates the clearance did not significantly boost the uptake of Windows 8 systems in Q4,โ€ Jay Chou, senior research analyst with IDCโ€™s Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker, said in a release announcing the latest figures.

โ€œLost in the shuffle to promote a touch-centric PC, vendors have not forcefully stressed other features that promote a more secure, reliable and efficient user experience,โ€ Chou said, adding, โ€œAs Windows 8 matures, and other corresponding variables such as Ultrabook pricing continue to drop, hopefully the PC market can see a reset in both messaging and demand in 2013.โ€

Lenovo closing in on HP

HP led the way in 2012โ€™s final quarter, shipping 15 million PCs worldwide, down 0.6 percent on the same period a year earlier. China-based Lenovo performed particularly well with 14.1 million shipments, marking a modest though healthy 8.2 percent increase.

For the whole of 2012, HP retained the top spot with 58.1 million shipments though this represented a 6.7 percent fall on 2011โ€™s figures. Lenovo is clearly the main threat to HP โ€“ it shipped 52.4 million units in 2012, marking an increase of nearly 20 percent.

The US market saw a 4.5 percent drop in year-on-year fourth quarter shipments, and a 7 percent decline for the full year.

IDC research director David Daoud put this down to the fact that many consumers had been expecting โ€œall sorts of cool PCs with tablet and touch capabilities.โ€ But instead they were offered mostly โ€œtraditional PCs that feature a new OS (Windows 8) optimized for touch and tablet with applications and hardware that are not yet able to fully utilize these capabilities.โ€

[Image: Arsgera / Shutterstock]

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