Netbooks salvage European PC sales

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 7 Aug 2009 at 11:21

Sales of PCs in Western Europe dropped by 3.3% in the second quarter, with only strong sales of netbooks preventing a full-blown collapse.

According to figures from Gartner, the business PC market was hardest hit with sales tumbling 21%. This was balanced out by a significant improvement in the consumer PC market which grew 21%, benefiting companies such as Acer, Apple and Samsung which have a strong consumer focus.

The UK was described as the "weakest market", with HP slipping to third place by market share behind Dell and Acer. Indeed, it was a particularly good quarter for Acer which managed to shift almost half the netbooks sold in Europe. Toshiba and Apple round out Europe's top five PC vendors.

"You have to view the market with and without mini-notebooks to understand the true picture," says Gartner principal analyst Ranjit Atwal.

"Without mini-notebooks, the market would have declined more than 15%, but given the new routes to market and price points of these PCs, they have managed to prevent a more severe decline."

And he wasn't predicting improvement any time soon: "There is much discussion on where the market is headed and at the moment there is only one direction and that is down. Even with the onset of back to school promotions, new products and Windows 7 to become available in the fourth quarter, the market will not recover until 2010," he concludes.