The headline above will not seem like breaking news to most avid tech enthusiasts. This is probably because most readers will have seen the growth of Chromebooks and low-cost PC solutions over the last year. Companies like Acer, Samsung, HP and more recently Asus have tried hard to dominate this market and that is due to what seems to be an increasingly growing market. That said, in spite of any growth by Chromebooks, they were not enough to save what is becoming a consistently declining market. At least according to the latest figures by the IDC.
In the latest report, IDC noted that the worldwide shipments of PC’s (which includes Chromebooks) for Q4 totaled 80.8 million units. This equates to a year-on-year drop of 2.4%. In spite of the year-on-year decline, Q4 was considered the best of 2014 with the overall total of units higher than what had been noted in any of other quarter of this year with the overall total of units shipped worldwide for the entire year equaling 308.6 million. This was again down on last year by 2.1%. Not to mention the 80.8 million market in Q4 was also higher than what had previously been anticipated with expectations being the quarter would result in a decline of 4.8% and not the 2.4% which it was.
In terms of the breakdown, the US and Europe remained the strongest markets, with Asia continuing to strengthen its market, but with Japan slumping in terms of sales. In the US, it was noted that HP had particularly done rather well with a year-on-year growth of more than 26%, which equated to their quarterly sales reaching nearly 15.9 million units. That said, this surge in HP was not enough to knock Lenovo off of the top spot, who remained the top worldwide seller for Q4 totaling just over 16 million units. If you are interested Dell and Acer took the third and fourth place, respectively. From the consumer perspective, Acer has been making big strides this year and especially with the success of their Chromebook offerings (which was noted in the IDC report). However, they were kept out of the top 5 worldwide shipments for Q4 by Apple, in spite of Asus seeing a growth of over 3% for their year-on-year figures.
