PC Shipments Skyrocket Smashing 10-Year Growth Record As New Generation Hardware Emerges
As the Coronavirus pandemic continues to linger, forcing more people to work and educate from home, the PC market is seeing a huge uptick in shipments. More precisely, the global PC market grew 12.7 percent from last year to reach 72.2 million units in the third quarter of 2020, marking the highest growth rate in the past 10 years.
The record growth follows a rather weak recovery in the first quarter. But by the second quarter of this year, things began to pick up, and then exploded. Notebook shipments did particularly well, notching 64 million units, nearly matching the record high 64.6 million notebooks shipped in the first quarter of 2011.
This is largely a result of COVID-19, with demand for PCs continuing to surge amid second waves of the virus in many countries. In addition, many companies are looking ahead to life after COVID-19, and specifically have embraced longer-term transitions to remote working, according to Canalys.
"The lasting effects of this pandemic on the way people work, learn and collaborate will create significant opportunities for PC vendors in the coming years," said Rushabh Doshi, Canalys Research Director. "As the line between work and home lives is increasingly blurred, it becomes important to position devices towards a wide array of use cases, with a focus on mobility, connectivity, battery life, and display and audio quality."
While COVID-19 might be the driving force for the PC's resurgence, we do not think it is the only reason. The PC market as a whole has been rather exciting this past year. Both AMD and Intel have launched compelling laptop processors, and the battle on the desktop has never been more fierce, with Ryzen providing some much needed competition.
Likewise, NVIDIA has created a lot of excitement in the PC gaming space with its GeForce RTX 30 series. So much, in fact, that the newest GPUs are likely to be sold out until next year, due to overwhelming demand. AMD has a new generation of graphics cards in the wings as well.
As for the OEMs, Lenovo holds the largest share of the PC market at 24.3 percent, just ahead of HP at 23.6 percent. Dell sits in third place at 15.1 percent, followed by Apple at 8.1 percent, Acer at 7.1 percent, and all others combining for the remaining 21.8 percent.
