WORLDWIDE PC shipments grew more than had been forecasted in the second quarter, driven by high demand and price declines.

Gartner said global PC shipments increased 16 per cent from a year ago in the second quarter, rising to 71.9 million units. The stronger than expected performance beat the company's forecast for 11.2 per cent growth in PC shipments by more than one-third.

Ongoing trends drove some of the growth, said Gartner analyst Mika Kitagawa. Demand remains strong in emerging markets such as Brazil, China, India and Russia, and the still increasing popularity of laptops is pushing up the number of computers per household.

Surprisingly, economic pressures had a positive influence on PC shipments within mature markets, Kitagawa said. The analyst had forecast less than 2 per cent growth in shipments of PCs in the US due to the effects ot the mortgage and credit crises. But problems in the financial sectors held down PC average selling prices, which contributed to 4.2 per cent growth in US PC shipments.

Gartner said that HP remained the leader in PC shipments, followed by Dell, then Lenovo, and trailed by Acer and Toshiba to round out the top five.

In June, Gartner increased its forecast for global PC shipment growth throughout 2008 to 12.5 per cent.

Given 16 per cent growth in the second quarter, perhaps Gartner is anticipating abruptly lower growth in PC shipments to appear during the second half of the year. Either that, or it's just terrified of releasing a PC shipments forecast that turns out to have been too high. µ

L'Inq
AP