Worldwide PC shipments are forecast to decline by 6.4% year over year in 2016.
This is according to the International Data Corporation's (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker, which notes this as an improvement over August's projection for a decline of 7.2% in 2016.
The third quarter of 2016 (3Q16) saw a year-over-year decline in shipments of 4.6% - more than 2 percentage points ahead of expectations, reveals IDC.
"The PC market continues to perform close to expectations," said Loren Loverde, vice president, of Worldwide Tracker Forecasting and PC research. "Some volatility in emerging regions is being offset by incremental gains in larger mature markets while the interaction with tablets and phones is stabilising. We continue to see steady progression toward smaller desktops and notebooks as replacement buying helps stabilise overall shipments in the coming years."
IDC says factors such as the transition to Windows 10 played a role. The 3Q16 gains came largely as a result of stronger momentum in the US, Western Europe, and Japan, and were driven by channel build up in anticipation of component shortages in areas such as display panels and storage. This is expected to slightly boost shipments into early 2017, but will not carry into later periods.
"Despite continued weakness in the consumer segment, the US PC market is showing some signs of stability in the near future with some sources of optimism for the long haul," says Neha Mahajan, senior research analyst, Devices and Displays.
According to Gartner, worldwide PC shipments totalled 68.9 million units in the third quarter of 2016, a 5.7% decline from the third quarter of 2015. This was the eighth consecutive quarter of PC shipment decline, the longest duration of decline in the history of the PC industry, says the research and advisory firm.
Tracy Tsai, research vice-president at Gartner, says: "The PC business model as we have traditionally known it is broken...The traditional way of gaining shipment market share by competing on price to stimulate demand simply won't work for the PC market over the next five years.
Global research firm TrendForce says worldwide notebook shipments for the first half of 2016 fell just 4% year on year to 74.18 million units. At the same time, there was a significant increase in stock-up demand due to arrivals of new notebook products and preparations for back-to-school sales in September.
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