For those keeping an eye on the market, reports of softening consumer demand for PCs have become like background music in recent months. So the key question for many is how much the market will contract in 2022 and when it will recover. IDC on Friday The market will shrink by 43.5 million units year-on-year in 2022, and will not return to growth for another year.
IDC expects PC shipments to drop 12.8% to 305.3 million in 2022 from 348.8 million in 2021. Total shipments of personal computing devices (PCs and tablets, or PCDs) will decline by 10.8% to 462.1 million units in 2022 compared to 2021. Shipments of PCs and tablets are up from pre-pandemic years, but they won’t return to their pre-pandemic peaks in 2025.
IDC sees saturation of PCs in consumer hands, a weakening global economy, and inflation as the main culprits for the lower outlook.
“Long-term demand will be driven by a gradual economic recovery combined with enterprise hardware refreshes nearing the end of support for Windows 10. Educational deployments and hybrid work will also drive additional volume. ,” said Jitesh Ubrani, Research Manager, IDC Mobility and Consumer Device Tracker.
One of the recent highlights is that consumers are spending less on PCs and tablets while the enterprise market continues to buy new hardware. In fact, IDC believes that consumers will buy PCDs 9.9% less this year, while business purchases will fall just 1.6%. But clearly, the consumer isn’t leading the flock here. Small businesses he plans to cut his procurement by 10.5% in 2022, while the public sector (government agencies, schools) plans to cut his PCD consumption by a whopping 20.3%. .
Linn Huang, research vice president of Devices and Displays at IDC, said: “If the economy picks up in time for the next major refresh cycle, it could drive some growth in years outside the forecast. We expect the market to move towards the more premium end of the market.”
IDC data indirectly confirmed of John Peddy Research According to a report earlier this week, PC CPU shipments to PC makers in Q2 2022 fell 33.7% year-over-year, while discrete desktop graphics card sales fell 9.6% year-over-year. JPR, on the other hand, counts chips sold to hardware manufacturers. The fewer chips shipped to PC makers in Q2 2022, the fewer PCs will be sold in the next quarter or so.
