With video card sales at an all-time low, it is evident that the PC market is not doing well at all. Only in the last few hours, however, have data arrived that give us a numerical idea of the contraction in the Personal Computer sector over the last year and, more specifically, in the last quarter.
To publish the data is the agency specialized in market analysis Canalyst. The data reported refer to the American market, but seem to be indicative of the global situation in the hi-tech sector. In particular, in the United States in the third quarter of 2022 there was a 12% decline in PC sales compared to Q3 of 2021. The distribution of this contraction, however, mostly damages the laptop market (-14%) compared to the desktop one, which even registers a tiny increase of 1% on an annual basis.
The resistance to the crisis period of the desktop market this quarter essentially depends on the launches of new GPUs and CPUs from NVIDIA, AMD and Intel, which seem to have stirred up the waters of a sector which, for at least six months now, seems to be particularly tired. In particular, the huge success of NVIDIA’s RTX 4090 may have helped lift sales rates compared to last year.
Even limiting ourselves to the laptop sector, however, the situation is rather fragmented, with Apple and Acer up year-on-yearrespectively with +26.5% and +14.0% compared to 2021, while the other members of the “Big 5” group, namely Dell, HP and Lenovo, are all in serious crisis, with percentage drops between 17% and 23% on an annual basis.
Overall, however, Canalyst analyst Brian Lynch explained that “the American PC market is in a prolonged period of contraction in demandsince both the demand of individuals and that of institutions and the educational sector are colliding with market saturation and inflation”.
