Future bright for commercial PC market - Canalys

Despite an overall market slump in desktop sales, demand for PCs from businesses is on the up

Businesses are bucking the trend of the ailing PC market, according to Canalys, which said XP migration is fuelling commercial demand.

According to the market watcher's latest figures, the overall PC market - including tablets - grew 17.9 per cent annually in the final quarter of 2013. Tablet sales rocketed 65.2 per cent year on year to 76.3m units and made up nearly half (48.3 per cent) of the total market.

But it was a bleak picture for the market discarding tablet shipments, as the number of traditional PC units that shipped fell 6.9 per cent compared with a year ago, with every global region posting a decline.

Just last week, analyst Context said that strong business PC sales will be a feature of 2014, and Canalys agreed.

"Commercial demand for PCs is improving as businesses face up to the need to migrate from Windows XP," it said.

"But Windows 8 will not be a major beneficiary as many businesses will take the safer option of moving to Windows 7. This provides an opportunity for vendors with strong enterprise sales and an established B2B channel in 2014."

Apple led the PC market last quarter, taking a 19.5 per cent share after shipping 30.9m units - more than two thirds of which were iPads.

Lenovo clung on to second place, taking an 11.8 per cent market share after a strong EMEA performance made up for a disappointing quarter in its core Chinese market.

"Worldwide, Lenovo shipped three times as many tablets in Q4 as HP and Dell combined, or two and a half times when excluding China," said Canalys analyst James Wang.

"Lenovo still has the potential to grow its global notebook shipments and has emerged as a challenger in the tablet space."