Indian PC market dips 6.5 percent in Q4 2011, Dell leads the pack

The Indian PC market has been a stagnant one, off late and it seems things are slowing down more, according to a report by Gartner. There were some 2.5 million desktops and notebooks that were sold in the fourth quarter of this year, according to the report. This is, of course, a larger number, but the market has shrunk by some 6.5 percent, as compared to the fourth quarter of 2010. The primary reason for this slowdown appears to be the Thailand floods, which forced large hard drive manufacturers to shut down factories. This led to price rises of hard drives around the world and this in turn, affected the PC market. 

Hasn’t been a great quarter

The companies that are currently leading, but by narrow margins are Dell, Lenovo, HP and Acer. HP took the biggest hit as their share in the market dropped by some 26 percent over the previous year. HCL has had a smaller share, as compared to the international brands and it too saw a drop of some 35 percent, this last quarter. They accounted for 5.5 percent of PC sales during this period. While in most other product categories, internationally, one sees well known brands accounting for most of the PC sales. In the market, things are different - unknown or smaller brands make up for some 41.4 percent of all PC markets - much more than any single brand. 

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There seems to be a general slowdown in PC purchases and notebooks seem to be the preferable of the two. It appears customers who’ve wanted to buy desktops already have and those users have few reasons to buy a new one or upgrade the hardware. This doesn’t look to change as Microsoft has announced Windows 8 system requirements and they are identical to Windows 7. With Intel, NVIDIA and Microsoft, all pushing for tablets, the PC market may not bounce back a lot, but slowly improving hard drives prices should provide some stability. Smartphones, in comparison continue to do really well with major developments being made to the exploding Android phone phenomenon.