UK PC market surges at the start of the year

Enterprise sales continue to grow

Enterprise PC sales in Western Europe continued to grow in January this year but were offset by a sluggish consumer market, according to findings from Context

Commercial PC revenues were up by five per cent year on year in January. Broken down, sales of ultra-slim notebooks grew by the biggest margin of 50 per cent year on year.

Context says that these PCs now account for 22 per cent of the commercial notebook market.

Meanwhile, desktop workstations were up by three per cent, notebook volumes were up by eight and notebook workstations were up by 16 per cent. However, desktop sales were down by one per cent.

Sweden, Denmark and the UK were the countries with the biggest commercial PC growth margins, at 26, 20.5 and 11.8 per cent respectively.

Switzerland and the Netherlands were the outliers seeing a decline in enterprise PC sales of 7.9 and 4.7 per cent.

The consumer market meanwhile dsaw sales down five per cent year on year. Growth in consumer ultra-slim notebooks was not enough to reverse the overall negative trend.

Context predicts that commercial sales will continue to be strong for the rest of 2019 driven by Windows 10 refreshes.

However, it warned that "the current Intel processor supply constraints are expected to have an impact on sell-through during the first half of 2019, although the extent of this will vary by country and vendor".