PC market on course for supercharged growth in 2021 despite chip shortages - IDC

The research analyst claims the consumer market is the biggest driver

The global PC market will continue to thrive with expected growth of 18.1 per cent in 2021 despite the ongoing critical shortage of semiconductors.

According to a new forecast from IDC, shipments will reach more than 357 million units with the overall five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) remaining positive at three per cent.

However, the market analyst still expects PC growth to drop slightly in 2022 by around 2.9 per cent.

"We continue to get an abundance of questions about the growing semiconductor shortage and its impact on PCs, but it is important to peel back the onion because there is a lot happening underneath the PC supply chain," said IDC worldwide mobile device trackers VP, Ryan Reith.

"We don't debate that the overall semiconductor market is constrained right now, but for the overall PC market it is a very different narrative than the years leading up to the pandemic.

"Prior to 2020, the market was undergoing CPU shortages and to a lesser extent tight memory and panel supply. Now the focus is around lower-priced components like notebook panel driver ICs, audio codecs, sensors, and power management ICs (PMICs). Nonetheless, without 100 per cent of the parts; a finished system will not ship, so a bottleneck is a bottleneck."

The analyst firm added there is "some common ground" within the market's three major segments - consumer, education, and commercial.

IDC claims the sectors are in "desperate need" of inventory, and believes the consumer segment has the biggest upside looking forward compared to pre-pandemic levels, followed by education, and then commercial.

Last month, Gartner figures found that global PC shipments totaled 69.9 million units in the first quarter of 2021, a significant rise of 32 per cent from the same period in 2020.