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While the Gartner and IDC PC market reports disagree in some cases, they both awarded Lenovo the top spot in PCs shipped globally.
Reports from Gartner and IDC on PC sales for Q3 2018 present some conflicting findings. IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker reported that 67.4m units were sold, while Gartner has the figure at 67.2m.
Gartner included sales of desktops, notebooks and ultra-mobile premium devices such as the Microsoft Surface, but not Chromebooks or iPads. IDC included desktops, notebooks and workstations.
Lenovo comes out on top
While the two reports differ regarding the state of the market itself, both note that Lenovo is firmly in the number-one position. IDC measured its market share at 24pc with 16,152m units, while Gartner reported Lenovo as shipping 15,889m units in the same time period.
Coming in second for both IDC and Gartner was HP, with Gartner reporting a 14,629m figure and IDC’s total at 15,359m, giving it a market share of approximately 22pc for Q3 of this year. Both reports generally noted Apple’s disappointing year, losing 8.5pc in shipments year on year according to Gartner and 11.6pc by IDC’s reckoning.
In somewhat positive news for Microsoft, Gartner said the company broke into the US top five for Q3 2018, displacing Acer. Analysts say its Surface device range is a growing positive aspect of its hardware business.
Third place went to Dell in both reports and Apple came in fourth place for Gartner, with 4,208m devices sold. For IDC, Acer claimed fourth position while Gartner awarded it fifth place. By IDC’s metric, Apple placed fifth.
CPU shortage may make an impact
Gartner analysts are concerned about the potential impact of Intel’s CPU shortage, predicting price increases and “changes to the vendor landscape”.
Principal analyst at Gartner, Mikako Kitagawa, said: “The PC market continued to be driven by steady corporate PC demand, which was driven by Windows 10 PC hardware upgrades. We expect the Windows 10 upgrade cycle to continue through 2020, at which point the upgrade demand will diminish.
“Despite the third quarter typically showing strong consumer PC sales due to the back-to-school season, weakness in consumer PC demand continued, offsetting the strong sales in the business market.”
