Have faster and smarter phones made desktops irrelevant?

PC shipments fell globally by 4.6% year-on-year in the first quarter but manufacturers say they are here to stay

Lenovo, HP and Dell together constitute over 60 per cent market share of the global PC industry. AP

The market for personal computers has been on a decline over the past four years in the face of stiff competition due to the rising popularity of premium smartphones offering large memory capacity, fast processors.

According to researcher Statista, almost 35 million fewer PC devices - including desktops, laptops and tablets - will be shipped globally in 2023 compared to almost 407 million in 2018. That compares to more than 1 billion smartphones shipped last year.

Mikako Kitagawa, senior principal analyst at US-based researcher Gartner, said weak consumer demand, short supplies of central processing units and an ever-widening range of smartphones have hurt the PC market.

And yet global PC manufacturers are confident the industry will remain a potent force given the inherent differences between the devices and smartphones.

"You can consume information on smartphone but you cannot create fresh data or infer new market trends because of [their] small screen and [relatively] little capacity," Dave Brooke, vice president of client solutions at Dell for Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East, Turkey and Africa, told The National.

PCs are primarily used in the corporate sector where there is a need to create unique content and analyse vast amounts of data. In that case, “the smartphone is not an option,” said Mr Brooke. Even for home use, PCs are more suited to applications such as sophisticated gaming and graphics creation. The smartphone “is only a complementary device” he added.

“From the business point of view, the PC industry is very important for Dell … contributing nearly $10 billion business (in company’s revenues) every quarter globally.”

Client Solutions Group, the Dell unit responsible for desktops, notebooks and tablets, as well as its branded peripherals business, reported a 6 per cent rise in revenue to $10.91bn in the first quarter of this year.

Still, according to Gartner, PC unit shipments fell worldwide - by almost 4.6 per cent year-on-year in the first quarter of 2019. Despite that, the top three global vendors – Lenovo, HP and Dell managed to increase shipments by focusing on high-end products and taking share from small vendors that struggled to secure CPUs.

Lenovo’s market share grew 6.9 per cent yearly while HP and Dell witnessed a growth of 1.5 per cent and 0.8 per cent respectively. All other brands such as Apple and Asus experienced a decline.

CPU is the most important part of the PC, controlling the both input and output operations specified by the user.

Abbas Ali, managing editor of TechRadar Middle East, said the role of PCs will become more specialised.

“Smartphones have taken over many of our computing tasks and will continue to eat into what PCs can do but there will always be a place for larger, more powerful devices to exist.”

Whether that's for rendering 3D effects, encoding videos, serving websites or creating apps, there will always be a need for larger, more powerful specialised devices, he added.

Chinese tech giant Lenovo, which benefited from the inclusion of Fujitsu’s shipments from its last year’s joint venture, has the largest global market share of PC industry at 22.5 per cent in the first quarter of this year, according to Gartner figures, followed by US firms HP and Dell at 21.9 and 17.6 per cent, respectively.

In May, last year, Lenovo and Japan’s Fujitsu announced a merger of their PC businesses. It resulted in Lenovo owning 51 per cent of the Fujitsu PC arm.

The fact that smartphones and PCs cater to different needs and markets means the PC industry is far from doomed, said Joumana Karam, regional marketing and product manager for MEA at Acer, which accounts for close to 6 per cent of global PC sales.

“People have a perception that desktop is a dying segment. However, the reality is that it is just changing form to adapt to the new needs of today and tomorrow.”

Ms Karam said many sectors, such as police, military, health care and government, are still desktop focused.

And, according to Yang Yuanqing, chairman and chief executive of Lenovo, the PC industry “is here to stay”.

“For Lenovo, the PC market is stable and growing both volume-wise and revenue-wise. Globally, it’s a $200bn industry and to find another such big industry is probably not easy."

However, Mr Yuanqing agrees there are challenges to face. “We need to make this industry smarter and more connected and that is our [manufacturers’] job.”