The Centre may have eased guidelines for IT and IT enabled services, but the covid-19 pandemic has already hit the sector hard. Global personal computer (PC) shipments declined 12.3 per cent in the January-March, with Asia Pacific (APAC) showing the steepest year-on-year decline of 27.1 per cent since Gartner started tracking the PC market. Worldwide PC shipments totaled 51.6 million units in the first quarter of 2020, a 12.3 per cent decline from the first quarter of 2019, according to preliminary results by Gartner, Inc. After three consecutive quarters of growth, the worldwide PC market saw its sharpest decline since 2013 due to the covid-19 outbreak.
‘The single most significant influencing factor for PC shipment decline was the coronavirus outbreak, which resulted in disruptions to both the supply and demand of PCs,’ said Mikako Kitagawa, research director at Gartner. ‘Following the first lockdown in China in late January, there was lower PC production volume in February that turned into logistics challenges.
With covid-19 first diagnosed in China, the country was the largest contributor to this decline as all business, government and consumer activities came to a halt in February. Overall PC shipments in China dropped by over 30 per cent compared to a year ago. Desk-based PCs, the primary commercial PC type for the government and education organizations, experienced the biggest drop of nearly 40 per cent. Mobile PCs declined less 20 per cent as notebook demands were driven by remote employees and e-learning students.
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