How Canalys, Gartner and IDC saw the PC market in Q2

The leading channel analysts have given their two cents on whether the global PC market had a strong or weak second quarter of the year

With the second quarter of the year behind us, analyst firms Canalys, Gartner and IDC have weighed in on the global PC market's earnings.

The three houses conclude the market has grown during Q2, albeit at a slower rate owing to global component shortages. However, as per the norm, don't agree on how much PC sales have increased by.

Starting with IDC, the researcher said worldwide shipments of traditional PCs, including desktops, notebooks, and workstations, reached 83.6 million units in Q2, up 13.2 per cent from the same period last year despite global component shortages and logistics issues.

Figures from Canalys, meanwhile, are in fact more in line with IDC's data.

Canalys claims the global PC market rose 13 per cent year on year to hit 82.3 million units.

The analyst also agreed that component supply issues remain a problem for the industry, however, said the extent of order shortfalls and backlogs is reducing.

Gartner's figures on the other hand don't come from left field, however, don't quite match the data from the other two analysts either.

It claims global PC shipments totaled 71.6 million units in Q2, a difference of ten million shipments, and a rise of just 4.6 per cent from the second quarter of 2020.

The research firm added that, while PC demand remained above pre-pandemic levels, this was a marked deceleration in growth compared to the record year on year growth of 35.7 per cent in the first quarter of 2021, due in part to the impact of ongoing component shortages.

While Gartner does not include Chromebooks in its traditional PC market results, Chromebook shipments were once again strong in the second quarter of 2021, it said.

The total combined worldwide PC/Chromebook market grew over ten per cent year on year.

"The global semiconductor shortage and subsequent component supply constraints have extended lead time for some enterprise mobile PC models to as long as 120 days," said Gartner research director, Mikako Kitagawa.

"This has led to prices increasing in the bill of materials, which vendors have passed on to end users. Moving forward, rising prices could continue to slow PC demand through the next six to 12 months."

Commercial vs consumer

Another area where the analysts have posted mixed findings is the consumer and commercial market.

IDC says with businesses opening back up, demand potential in the commercial segment appears promising.

However, adds there are also early indicators of consumer demand slowing down as people shift their spending priorities after nearly a year of aggressive PC buying.

Canalys again finds itself on the same side of IDC, stating demand remains high, particularly due to a strong commercial segment, as the pandemic-driven urgency for consumers to get their hands on PCs is starting to wane.

It added commercial demand from recovering businesses acted as the key driver for the top PC vendors.

"The slowdown in consumer demand, stemming from fulfilment of backlogs and greater market penetration, has been nicely balanced by growing commercial demand, as markets around the world limp back to normality," said Canalys research director, Rushabh Doshi.

Meanwhile, Gartner opposes Canalys and IDC again with its claims that some of the top vendors, namely Apple, Acer and ASUS, grew faster than the market owing to improved availability of consumer PCs.

The firm said the consumer PC market was less impacted by shortages than the enterprise market, as vendors can be more flexible in the system design of consumer models, enabling workarounds for certain supply constraints.

Gartner added that demand for PCs from both consumer and business markets remained strong in Asia Pacific.

Which vendors emerged on top?

On the best performing vendors, all three analysts agreed that Lenovo led the pack, as they did in Q1, followed by HP and Dell.

Both IDC and Canalys said Lenovo grew by around 14 per cent with more than 20 million units shipped.

While Gartner's figures were slightly less optimistic at 17.2 million shipments and growth of just 3.6 per cent.

The three firms were also on the same page with the third best performing vendor Dell, with IDC and Canalys claiming year on year growth of 16.4 per cent and Gartner coming in slightly lower at 14.4 per cent.

However, with second place vendor HP, Gartner yet again published differentiating results, claiming the tech giant saw a drop in sales during Q2, dipping 11.3 per cent from Q2 2020.

While both Canalys and IDC said HP rose 2.8 per cent with 18.5 million shipments.

Gartner blamed supply constraints on enterprise notebook PCs, as well as shipment declines in North America and EMEA for HP's slump.

Future outlook

Though the three analysts found the global PC market is still on the up, it seems the surge is slowing down.

Previous quarter results from IDC showed a Q1 2021 spike of 55.2 per cent and 26.1 per cent rise in Q4 2020.

The analyst previously said it expects PC growth to drop slightly in 2022 by around 2.9 per cent.

Fellow research firm Context published its own figures on mobile devices in Q2.

It found the rise in demand for mobile devices due to the pandemic has led to significant changes in the PC workstation volume mix.

Notebooks became the dominant form factor at the end of last year and accounted for 60 per cent of all workstations sold through Western Europe's largest distributors by early Q2 2021, compared to 49 per cent one year ago.

Context added that in April and May 2021, the number of notebooks sold increased again by 81 per cent year on year. Desktop sales also grew in this period but by a smaller amount.

Context claims the shift to mobile devices has been driven by continual improvements to product performance over the past few years and was boosted in 2020 and H1 2021 by changes in working patterns in response to Covid-19.

It concluded that demand in the segment is expected to stay high as digitalisation progresses across a number of industries and the need for computing power to manage complex tasks increases.