Context results

Market research firm Context has compiled the results of its resellers and hardware questionnaire, which appeared in PC Dealer, 25 February.

Totals may not sum equal 100 due to rounding of numbers.

It appears that 32Mb is now required for desktops and 16Mb will not be sufficient for much longer. For notebooks, it's almost a 50-50 split between 16Mb and 32Mb, with about 40 per cent still satisfied with 16Mb.

Only servers peak at 64Mb, but figures suggest a move towards 128Mb for this sector. Memory requirements for workstations seem more evenly spread, from 16Mb right up to 128Mb.

Trends

There were no significant trends among the respondents for adding products to their portfolios. However, almost five per cent of the panelists were intending to drop AST from their portfolio within the next two months.

It's worth noting that AST was picked as one of the main hardware manufacturers in terms of revenue. However, this can be explained by AST's decision to concentrate on the notebook market and withdraw from all other sectors.

Have you been selling hardware with the following processors?

Cyrix and AMD are neck and neck; both are sold by almost 40 per cent of the respondents. The figures show the extent to which the Pentium is in the process of being replaced by the Pentium MMX and Pentium II. The Pentium Pro is mainly a server processor and is, therefore, not offered by as many dealers as the other Intel-based processors.

How are your sales of PCs split between the business and home markets?

Twenty eight per cent of panelists concentrate entirely on the business market, while none of them concentrate on the home market only. In general, the majority of sales are targeted at the business market. Those dealers that do sell to the home sector generally do not rely on it as a main source of income.

This table shows the five most mentioned manufacturers; almost 70 were named. This question was run in a similar questionnaire a year ago with the following results: Compaq, 18 per cent; Hewlett Packard, 13 per cent; and IBM, AST, Dell and Tulip sharing third place with four per cent. It's noticeable that Acer did not figure among the top three a year ago, and dealers have moved away from all of last years' three main manufacturers.

Although the majority of panelists sell desktops and notebooks, figures suggest that dealers are moving out of the more obvious sectors.