Europe was hit by the Brexit effect with the ongoing political uncertainty being blamed for customers showing caution about hardware investments. As a result shipments came in at two percent in EMEA for Q3, which was below the global average. Apple was the only vendor to see increases in the region.
Rushabh Doshi, research director of Canalys’ mobility services said: “The PC market high is refreshing. However, there is a limit to how quickly leading vendors can ramp production. Intel remains a key bottleneck, with pressure on its 14nm CPU supply not likely to see improvement until Q1 2020. However, the Intel CPU shortage provided leading PC vendors an advantage over smaller rivals drove HP and Lenovo to their best Q3 performance to-date.
“Going forward, leading vendors will have an opportunity to further consolidate the market and squeeze smaller vendors’ market share, if the Intel supply is not able to satisfy the spike in orders.”
At the same time research from Context showed that consumers were driving demand for another hardware category, premium monitors, with home office users, gamers and creatives some of the key buyers.
Sales of monitors across Western Europe through consumer channels, retail and etail, continued to grow and were up by fore per cent year-on-year in August.