The Middle East and Africa (MEA) PC market declined by a narrow margin of 0.6% year-on-year during the final quarter of 2012, according to preliminary results released by IDC.
IDC recently said global sales dropped 6.4%, to 89.9 million units, while Gartner pegs the worldwide drop at 4.9%, to 90.3 million units. IDC said the fourth quarter of 2012 was the first time in over five years that the PC market experienced a year-on-year decline during the holiday season.
With a total of 5.3 million units shipped to the MEA region during the quarter, IDC says desktop shipments slowed 3.7% year-on-year, to total two million units, while portable PC shipments grew 1.3%, to reach 3.3 million units.
"The ongoing shift towards mobility in both the consumer and commercial segments has continued to dampen the demand for desktops. Despite the ongoing efforts of certain multinational vendors to penetrate the consumer desktop market by launching new devices such as 'all-in-ones', the desktop form factor experienced a slowdown in demand from the consumer segment."
IDC adds that, while overall commercial demand in the region for PCs slowed down year-on-year, a massive notebook deal was delivered to Pakistan's education sector.
Downward trend
The growing popularity of tablets has continued to slow growth in demand for portable PCs in the region, with the last quarter coming in at the lowest year-on-year growth rate of any quarter in 2012.
"A growing portion of home users are gaining confidence in tablet usage, further prolonging the refreshment cycle for portable PCs," says Fouad Rafiq Charakla, a research manager at IDC Middle East, Africa, and Turkey.
"Meanwhile, the failure of the ultra-slim notebook category to swiftly gain momentum as a result of prevailing high prices has combined with a soft response from the market to Microsoft's newly launched Windows 8 operating system to further compound the slowdown."
As forecast, mini-notebook shipments have also continued to decline at a fast pace in the region, with the availability of lower-priced tablets cannibalising their demand.
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