PC market boosted by education deployments

Australia’s PC market in Australia posted year-on-year growth of 2.2 per cent for the fourth quarter of 2017 buoyed by major deployments in the education sector, according to IDC.

Around 1.16 million desktop, notebooks and workstations were shipped in Australia during the quarter. Growth was highest in the public and private sector at 56.6 per cent year-on-year, the researcher said.

HP and Acer, which dominated the education sector until recently, faced renewed competition from Lenovo this year, which grabbed 22.7 per cent of this segment, compared to 11.5 per cent the same time last year, IDC said.

The government and enterprise sectors posted growth rates of 11.5 per cent and 2.3 per cent year-on-year respectively. SMB sales declined by 23.7 per cent year-on-year despite the federal government’s tax benefits, IDC said.

“The small and medium business market segment continues to sweat assets after the Windows free OS upgrade; the option of having a flexible device refresh rate, unlike global enterprise accounts that mostly have a fixed refresh rate, is impacting the SMB segment,” said Sagar Raghavendra, client devices analyst at IDC Australia.

The consumer segment was also relatively flat year-on-year with hype around Amazon in Australia, which launched last December, doing little to improve consumer spending, said Raghavendra.

Meanwhile, the notebooks PC market grew by 2.3 per cent year-on-year.

“Chromebook [sales] grew by 67.2 per cent year-on-year, the majority of which came from the education segment. The uptake of Chromebooks is expected to increase in 2018,” said Raghavendra.

“The market also continues to shift to higher price brands as convertible and ultra slim form factors take over from traditional notebooks,” he said.

HP, Lenovo and Apple held the top three positions during the quarter with 28.4 per cent, 16.6 per cent and 16.3 per cent shares respectively. They were followed by Dell and Acer with 15.2 per cent and 11.5 per cent respectively.

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