Q2 2017 PC Sales - Pace falls below the 250M annual mark

Last week - IDC and Gartner posted their PC shipment analysis of Q2 2017 and both show year over year declines of 3.3% and 4.2% respectively.

 Sales for Q2 1017 totaled around 60M units with the top five HP, Lenovo, Dell, Apple and Asus accounting for about 75% of all sales.  And the top 3 account for nearly 60%

 And while some firms like HP saw a nice 6.2% increase year over year - it's the Others category that continues to drag the entire industry sales numbers down with a 12.2% decline.  

 To me though the more important fact is that at the 60M unit pace seen for both Q1 and Q2 - that I believe the industry is going to have a hard time to meet a 250M plateau for the year.  In 2016 the industry sold 260M units - 250M would represent another nearly 4% decline.  

 And its not like their aren't some really great PCs out there.   One would have to argue that the current state of PCs with 7th Gen Core CPU, DDR4 Ram, M.2 SSD, 2K and higher displays, touch and ink support that the level of hardware is excellent.

 So what is going on - in my mind - two things...

 First - the world has gone mobile.  I estimate that nearly 1.7B smartphone devices will be sold in 2017.  If you say that we do sell 250M PCs - then that means a market scale ratio of nearly 7 to 1.  

 Second - it's the apps stupid.  Whether or not you like the Windows 10 operating system or not doesn't matter.  What does matter is that MS has not been able to draw the mobile app crowd to develop for Windows.  I would argue that if you had the same level of app portfolio available for your PC as you do your iOS or Android device - you might actually consider buying a new PC.  

 But the reality is you never will.  MS has lost an entire generation of developers to Mobile and they won't return.  And with MS's failure in the mobile market hinders any attempt to salvage that market even further.

 And even the mobile augmentation market - so lapdocks, etc has not really gained traction.  

 Bottom line is this - even though the state of the art in PC hardware has never been better - the market has moved on and PC sales will hover around 250M this year and continue a slow decline.  We'll also continue to see the total market share of the top 3 grow while the "Others" will continue to drop.  That consolidation is inevitable and the big 3 will fight over splitting up that 25% market share... 




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