JB Hi Fi PC Sales Up As PC Market Tanks
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PC manufacturers in Australia are concerned that the new Microsoft 10 OS will not give them the lift that the industry needs after PC sales fell somewhere between 9.5% and 11% in the last quarter.

Beating the downturn is JB Hi Fi who before their “quiet” period reported strong PC growth especially for Lenovo and Acer PC’s. 

PC sales in the second quarter suffered their sharpest decline in two years, according to data released by research firms Gartner and IDC. 

Manufacturers shipped 68.4 million PCs in the second quarter, a 9.5% drop from the same quarter in 2014, according to Gartner. Based on IDC’s data, the market saw a 11.8% year-over-year decline in the second quarter of 2015, with worldwide PC shipments of 66.1 million. IDC doesn’t count tablets in its figures.

Analysts attributed three factors to this decline: companies reducing PC inventory in anticipation of Windows 10; weak exchange rates effectively making PCs more expensive; and unusually high PC sales last year because of Microsoft phasing out support for the Windows XP operating system.

Over the weekend Toshiba teamed up with Harvey Norman to offer several cheap notebook deals with the big retailer using TV and catalogues to promote the notebooks due to poor Toshiba notebook sales across their network. 

Lenovo maintains a strong lead in the latest numbers with a market share of nearly 20%, selling 13.5 million units in the second quarter, based on Gartner’s numbers. 

But the Chinese company also experienced a 6.8% shipment decline over the same quarter last year – its first decline since the second quarter of 2013.

At both Harvey Norman and JB Hi Fi Fi Lenovo has increased their share of the consumer notebook market.

Apple  saw the biggest growth out of any PC vendor. Worldwide shipments for its Mac computers jumped 16.1% to 5.1 million units in the second quarter over the same quarter last year, according to IDC. The research firm said Apple may be benefitting from uncertainties surrounding Microsoft’s Windows 10 with tens of thousands of consumers switching to the iOS from Apple as opposed to a free Windows 10 upgrade. 

Globally Acer PC shipments declined by 20% in the second quarter from the previous year, according to Gartner – and by 27%, according to IDC’s count.

Many in the PC industry are expecting the impending release of Microsoft’s Windows 10 operating system to help spur sales in the second half of this year. But even though Windows 10 is coming out on July 29, analysts don’t expect the new operating system will be enough to bring growth back to the industry this year. Gartner expects shipments to decline 4.4% overall in 2015. Because Windows 10 is a free upgrade for existing Windows users, IDC expects many of these users will stick with their current PCs rather than buying a new one.

Analysts expect the PC market to stabilize in 2016.