Beancounters at Canalys have added up some numbers and reached the conclusion that remote working has lead to a boom in PC sales.
The PC market grew at the fastest rate in a decade during the third quarter of 2020, thanks to the surge in demand for hardware due to offices physically closing and employees working from home.
Recently released Canalys data shows the global PC market climbed 12.7 percent from a year ago to reach 79.2 million units in Q3 2020 as it continued to benefit hugely from the COVID-19 crisis.
After a weak Q1, the recovery in Q2 continued into Q3 this year, and it even grew on top of a strong market the previous year. Global notebook shipments touched 64 million units (almost as much as the record high of Q4 2011 when notebook shipments were 64.6 million) as demand continued to surge due to second waves of COVID-19 in many countries and companies continued to invest in longer-term transitions to remote working.
Shipments of notebooks and mobile workstations grew 28.3 percent year-on-year. This contrasted with desktop and desktop workstations, which saw shipments shrink by 26 percent.
Lenovo captured the top spot in the vendor rankings, shipping 19.3 million units to boast a year-on-year a growth of 11.4 percent and capture 24.3 percent of the market share. HP followed, shipping 18.8 million units and capturing 23.6 percent of the market. This represented an 11.9 percent year-on-year growth.
Despite shipping approximately 12 million units, Dell actually slipped in terms of annual growth, shrinking by 0.5 percent year-on-year, and seeing market share decrease from 17.1 percent in 2019 to 15.1 percent in 2020. This was the only vendor to see shipments reduce.
Apple and Acer, as well as other manufacturers, saw double-digit growth rates versus performance in Q3 2019.
