Surprisingly, traditional PC volumes grew by nearly 5% globally in the fourth quarter of 2019 and reached the highest volume for a single quarter in four years, IDC said Monday.
Also, shipments for all of 2019 grew by 2.7%, the first full year of PC growth since 2011.
“This past year was a wild one in the PC world,” said Ryan Reith, program vice president at IDC. While market challenges persist, 2019 showed clearly that demand for traditional desktops, workstations and laptops still exists even with the popularity of smartphones and other mobile devices.
The commercial sector saw momentum for transitioning PCs to Windows 10 before the end of Windows 7 support on Jan. 14. That meant that Lenovo, HP and Dell were able to consolidate their hold on the market with a combined share of 65%, up from 63% in 2018.
There were concerns about CPU availability, but AMD CPUs helped ease those concerns. Also, the fourth quarter saw global trade tensions ease.
IDC research manager Jitesh Ubrani said the coming year to 18 months could be challenging partly because the majority of Windows 10 upgrades will be completed, even as component shortages continue.
Lenovo finished 2019 as the top provider of PCs, just ahead of HP. Lenovo had 64.768 million PC shipments, while HP had 62.908 million. HP was the top PC company in 2018, but even though it finished second to Lenovo, HP was able to increase market share to 23.6%.
Dell finished third with 46.545 million. Apple was fourth with 17.684 million, and Acer was fifth with 17.029 million. Apple actually saw a decline in 2019 of 2.2% from its 2018 total of 18.083 million.
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