Tag: IDC

PC shipments in Europe “stabilise”

Posted on April 18, 2014 by - News

european-commissionA report from market research firm IDC said there are indications that shipments of PCs in the European, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) stabilised in the first quarter of this year.

21.8 million units shipped in EMEA, a decline of 1.1 percent compared to the same quarter last year.

But Western Europe showed a growth of 8.6 percent, spurred by business demand.  If that percentage is taken as a pie, commerical units showed an increase of 15.1 percent, while the retail market showed growth of 2.1 percent.

It’s the end of support for Windows XP that drove the rebound, according to Chrystelle Labesque of IDC.  And companies have started to invest in IT again, she said.  There is more business confidence.  Neverless, the overall PC market in central and eastern Europe and in the Middle East and Africa showed a year on year decline of 12 percent.

HP did well, as did Lenovo, while Dell was in third place and Acer in fourth place.  Asus took the fifth place.

Tablet growth slows

Posted on March 6, 2014 by - News

ipad3Despite phenomenal growth in sales during 2013, it seems that the tablet market will slow down during this year.

That’s according to market research company IDC that said the total tablet market – including stand alone units and 2-in-1 devices – will grow by 19.4 percent this year, down from 51.6 percent in 2013.

There is slowing growth at the consumer end of the market, and average selling prices (ASPs) have fallen rapidly in the tablet market.

Prices in 2013 dropped by 14.6 percent but IDC said price erosion “has started to slowly bottom out”, meaning ASPs will only fall by 3.6 percent this year.

Tom Mainelli, who runs devices and displays at IDC, said the white box tablet market will slow this year.  In mature markets, people are sticking with their current tablets and few feel the need to upgrade them, he said.

But there’s always a silver lining to every cloud. He said that commercial shipments are set to go up and while tablet growth has largely been confined to verticals like education, in the future tablets will penetrate SMEs globally.  And that will give a boost to Microsoft Windows.

Jitesh Ubrani, a research colleague of Mainelli, thinks that Android and iOS will stay as the dominant forces although Windows could grab more than a quarter of the market in the future.

There’s a little light at the end of the PC tunnel

Posted on February 18, 2014 by - News

IndiashareA report from IDC said that despite overall doom and gloom, there’s some pockets of the world where PC things are not that bad.

India, said IDC, showed a year on year growth of 4.8 percent for 2013, with 11.5 million units shipping.

Of course India has a population of over one billion people but it has never adopted the PC platform wholeheartedly.

The growth, said IDC, was largely due to state governments buying as part of a scheme to distribute free laptops to students.

And the enterprise segment managed 6.7 million units in 2013 – up 15.8 percent.

There are negative factors impacting the market, said IDC. Those include weak growth, slowdown in hiring people, the devaluation of the rupee and layoffs in the enterprise market.

And if you split out the consumer part of the market, that showed a year on uear decline of 7.4 percent.  The teapot in the broom cupboard are sales of smartphones and tablets.

Smartphone shoppers smarter than average shopper

Posted on January 17, 2014 by - News

Amazon logoResearch from IDC suggests that your average smartphone shopper is smarter than your average bear.

And smartphones are turning out to be a bit of a nightmare for your average high street shop.

IDC analysed app and mobile of over 10,000 smartphone users during the holiday season.

One in three of the people IDC surveyed said they bought more online than from bricks and mortar outfits in the season, compared to the same period the year before.

Amazon did particularly well out of the trend.

Of those that were surveyed, 69 percent believed that smartphones were critical tools when you’re out shopping.  And 70 percent said they’d use their smartphones more in the future.

Five out of 10 people check reviews from their smartphones and shoppers tend to trust social networks for views.

IDC’s results were born out by Dan Wagner, founder and CEO of Powa Technologies. He said: “The traditional stores really need to up their game to compete in the new shopping paradigm that we are entering. Customer engagement is the key to survival in 2014, at present customers who walk through the doors of high street shops are unknown to them.

“This needs to change fast, customer engagement holds the critical path to growth in fierce market conditions. It is vital for retailers to know the buying behaviour of the person who has walked through the door: are they a loyal customer? What are they interested in? Online retailers have all this information and utilise it to engage their customers very effectively as the sales figures have born out.”

EMEA PC shipments down 16% in Q3

Posted on October 22, 2013 by - News

european-commissionPC shipments in EMEA declined 16 percent in Q3 2014, hitting a grand total of just 21.4 million units. What’s more, research firm IDC reports notebook shipments dropped 20.6 percent, while desktops weathered the storm with a 7 percent plunge. This is understandable because desktops can’t be cannibalized by tablets, so sales of workstations and gaming desktops are still relatively stable.

However, there are some encouraging signs. Although the market contracted, the drop wasn’t as bad as last quarter and there are some signs of recovery.

“The third quarter marked a change in the overall market trend,” said Chrystelle Labesque, EMEA research manager. “While it is too early to talk about recovery, the worse seems to have been reached in the second quarter of 2013. However, the ramp-up is mainly in the commercial area, with September performance above expectations for most players.”

Labesque added that the end of Windows XP support in 2014 is already driving IT departments to focus on hardware refresh, generating higher renewal in the corporate space.

Shipments in Western Europe were down 13.2 percent year-on-year. The back-to-school period didn’t help much, as demand remained soft, which can also be attributed to the late rollout of Windows 8.1, at least to some extent.

IDC believes new form factors like convertibles based on Intel’s new SoCs could drive demand in the fourth quarter and the introduction of Bay Trail and Windows 8.1 products might be the reason shipments were slow in Q3, as nobody wanted to end the quarter with practically outdated inventory.

Interestingly, Central and Eastern Europe did even worse than the Middle East and Africa, with a decline of 22.2 percent. MEA dropped just 14.5 percent.

As far as vendors go, Lenovo is continuing to outperform the competition. It ended the quarter with a 15 percent share of the market, up from 10.7 percent in the second quarter. HP also gained share, and it’s still the leader with 21 percent, up from 18.2 percent. Acer and Asus continued to bleed, losing almost a fifth of their share in the process.

PC market continues to be weak

Posted on October 10, 2013 by - News, Products

IDC graphIDC released figures estimating that worldwide PC shipments accounted for 81.6 million units in Q3 of 2013 – that’s a drop of 7.6 percent, compared to the previous year.

But IDC said it had expected a decline of 9.5 percent for the quarter.  It said that shipments were weak in the early part of the quarter but business buys and channel intake of Windows 8.1 based systems happened in September.

IDC said emerging markets continued to be weak, while the channel and vendors were stock heavy on Ivy Bridge systems and eroded by lower priced smartphones and tablets.

Upgrades from Windows XP boosted shipments in the enterprise desktop section.

Rajani Singh, senior research analyst at IDC, said that the US market hasn’t changed that much. There may be a small increase in the fourth quarter, he said. But that will be followed “by a challenging 2014”.

In EMEA the PC market continued to decline with weak consumer demand a shift to tablets.  The channel maintained lean inventories during the period.

The only bright light were “pockets of investments” despite companies still being reluctant to spend any money.

Lenovo is the top vendor and is expanding into the channel, while HP and Dell were numbers two and three.  Acer and Asus both were weakened by lack of spend by consumers. Asus doesn’t have a significant corporate user base.

Public cloud spending to pass $100bn in 2017

Posted on September 18, 2013 by - News

cloud (264 x 264)Public IT cloud services spending could sail past the $100 billion milestone in 2017, according to figures from IDC.

Worldwide spending will reach a chunky $47.4 billion for this year, and is expected to reach $107 billion in 2017. The analyst house expects the scale of cloud adoption to grow significantly and rapidly, especially as IT infrastructure at many companies begins to age. According to IDC, systems are becoming so complex and expensive that an alternative – cloud – will be the only way out.

IDC believes that initial hesitation towards privacy and control in cloud are now being addressed, and more competition in the segment is going to seriously lower prices and expand choice of services to potential customers.

IDC cites Google as a company experiencing rapid growth in cloud adoption. Over 5 million are estimated to be using the company’s cloud offering, Google Apps, compared to 3 million in 2009.

Senior IDC analyst Frank Gens believes with the emergence of business as a service, cloud adoption will pick up, and its value with it. “Much of the growth in cloud services is being driven by the increase in deployment options,” Gens said.

“The growing richness of these options is a clear accelerator for overall cloud services adoption,” Gens said. “The emergence of virtual private cloud offerings has helped to shift momentum from dedicated private cloud offerings toward public cloud offerings”.

Cloud of unknowing descends on public IT

Posted on September 4, 2013 by - News, Products

Clouds in Oxford: pic Mike MageeMarket research company IDC has gazed in its crystal ball or inspected a set of entrails and has concluded that worldwide spending on public IT cloud services will be worth $47.4 billion this year.

And there’s more to come, according to the auspices.  By 2017, spending will reach $107 billion meaning that between then and now sales will grow by 23.5 percent, compounded annually.

The analysts believe that cloud services are blowing into a chapter two phase where mobile, social and big data will become interdependent.

Chief IDC diviner Frank Gens calculates thus: “Over the next several years, the primary driver for cloud adoption will shift from economics to innovation as leading-edge companies invest in cloud services as the foundation for new competitive offerings. The emergence of cloud as the core for new ‘business as a service’ offerings will accelerate cloud adoption and dramatically raise the cloud model’s strategic value beyond CIOs to CXOs of all types.”

Virtual private clouds help to persuade organisations that the cloud is not dangerous but instead has a silver lining.

By 2017, according to Gens, public IT cloud services will account for seventeen percent of IT product spend. Software as a service (SaaS) will keep the biggest chunk of the pie, and account for 59.7 percent of revenues in 2017, while fast growing categories include the dreadfully named “platform as a service” (PaaS) and the almost equally gruesome “Infrastructure as a Service” (IaaS) with compound annual growths of 29.7 percent and 27.2 percent.

PC market to go from bad to worse

Posted on August 30, 2013 by - News

pc-sales-slumpAs if there was not enough bad news on the PC front, IDC has updated its forecast for 2013 and it now estimates PC shipments will fall 9.7 percent this year. Back in May IDC said PC sales would drop 7.8 percent, but in the meantime things have gotten a lot worse it seems. PC shipments dropped 4 percent in 2012, so the cumulative decline will be even worse.

So what happened over the last three or so months that made IDC slash another two percent from its forecast?

It wasn’t the poor showing of Haswell notebooks, or the complete absence of hybrids and other half baked attempts to salvage the market. It was China, along with other emerging markets. IDC says consumer interest remains “stubbornly depressed” but the main reason is still soft demand in emerging markets. Not that long ago, analysts were expecting emerging markets to save PC’s bacon, but now it seems they were wrong. IDC now expects a double-digit decrease in China and many other markets in the region will follow suit. India on the other hand is doing just fine, but India alone isn’t enough to reverse the trend.

Meanwhile channel sources are reporting stagnant inventory and plenty of demand for tablets and smartphones. As a result, leading emerging markets are expected to stay in the red next year. The market as a whole is expected to decline through 2014, but eventually it will recover in 2015 and see some modest growth. IDC says the industry will never return to peak volumes seen in 2011. Worldwide PC sales in 2012 totalled 349 million and they’ll be down to 315 million this year and they’ll “recover” to 319.8 million in 2017, which sounds encouraging until you factor in population growth.

“The days where one can assume tablet disruptions are purely a First World problem are over,” said Jay Chou, Senior Research Analyst, Worldwide Quarterly PC Trackers at IDC. “Advances in PC hardware, such as improvements in the power efficiency of x86 processors remain encouraging, and Windows 8.1 is also expected to address a number of well-documented concerns. However, the current PC usage experience falls short of meeting changing usage patterns that are spreading through all regions, especially as tablet price and performance become ever more attractive.”

Worse, the post-2014 recovery will be slow and it will be driven in part by the need to refresh existing systems, which already have much longer lifecycles than a few years ago. Things will start to pick up as businesses start upgrading their old XP boxes, while entry level ultraslims and cheap convertibles are expected to do well on the more consumerish side of things.

While this sounds encouraging, it should be noted that all three categories tipped for success aren’t big money makers. Businesses upgrading ancient XP machines won’t go for anything expensive, entry level hybrids and ultraslims will be very cheap as well, which is not good news for ASPs. What’s more, hybrids and ultraslims have to compete with even cheaper tablets to some extent, so tight margins will be the norm. Needless to say, vendors aren’t exactly thrilled by the prospect of having to build, market and service tons of cheap hybrids only to make peanuts at the end of the day.

IDC sees gloom in tablet market

Posted on August 30, 2013 by - News

cheap-tabletsThe PC market has been coughing up phlegm for quite a while and for the last couple of years we’ve been told that tablet would wreck the PC market. This of course was rubbish, since tablets can only complement PCs, not replace them, and the real reasons behind the PC slump are a bit more complex.

Research from IDC has revealed that the tablet market is cooling down. The research firm cut its unit shipment forecast from 229.3 million units to 227.4 million units, which doesn’t sound like much, but it is a telltale sign that many got carried away in the tablet craze. However, although growth is slowing, tablet shipments this year will still be 57.7 percent above 2012 shipments. By 2017 IDC expects shipments to hit the 407 million mark. Mature markets are expected to cede market share to emerging markets over the next few years, namely the Asia Pacific region.

While mature markets such as North America and Western Europe have driven much of the tablet market’s growth to date, IDC expects shipment growth to begin to slow in these markets. The main culprits are market saturation, increased adoption of phablets and the eventual growth of wearable tech, which has yet to enter the fray.

“A lower than anticipated second quarter, hampered by a lack of major product announcements, means the second half of the year now becomes even more critical for a tablet market that has traditionally seen its highest shipment volume occur during the holiday season,” said Tom Mainelli, Research Director, Tablets. “We expect average selling prices to continue to compress as more mainstream vendors utilize low-cost components to better compete with the whitebox tablet vendors that continue to enjoy widespread traction in the market despite typically offering lower-quality products and poorer customer experiences.”

IDC research reveals another interesting trend, the rise of tablets in the commercial segment. Education projects have a lot to do with it, along with adoption in vertical markets such as retail. This segment will slowly double from 10 percent in 2012 to 20 percent in 2017. This might indicate that vendors will be forced to get creative and design more specialized tablets for businesses and schools.

IBM tops server charts, revenues fall

Posted on August 28, 2013 by - News

ibm-officeIDC’s latest worldwide server market figures are out, and IBM was top dog yet again despite a 10 percent yearly decline in factory revenue, and soft demand for System x and Power Systems.

Factory revenue overall worldwide decreased by 6.2 percent – but still netted $11.9 billion for the second quarter of 2013 alone. This was the second consecutive year of revenue decline as demand weakened in most regions around the world, while server unit shipments dropped 1.2 percent to 2.0 million units, the third consecutive quarterly decline.

Volume systems dropped 2.4 percent, while midrange system demand decreased a chunky 22.3 percent. High end systems decreased 9.5 percent.

HP was just behind IBM with 25.9 percent of the market. HP also experienced a 17.5 percent decline in factory revenue, as well as poor demand for the x86 ProLiant servers and continued declines in HP Integrity demand.

Dell came in third with 18.8 percent factory market share for the quarter, but factory revenues were up 10.3 percent compared to the same time last year, pitching Dell at its highest ever market share.

Oracle stayed at number four, holding six percent market share, with factory revenue decreases of 5.7 percent compared to the same time last year. Cisco was fifth with 4.5 percent share, but experienced a 42.6 percent yearly revenue growth, putting it above last quarter’s tie with Fujitsu.

IDC’s GM for enterprise platforms, Matt Eastwood, said: “Mainstream SMB and enterprise server customers around the world continue to focus on consolidation, virtualization, and migration initiatives aimed at increasing efficiency and lowering datacenter infrastructure costs. At the same time, challenging economic conditions are dampening demand for new IT projects necessary to grow the server market globally”.

“It is clear that the competitive dynamics in the server market remain fierce as the leading server vendors work to offset weak demand for generally higher margin Unix and blade servers with lower margin rack and density optimised servers,” Eastwood said.

STAP IT – IDC expects boom in threat market

Posted on August 19, 2013 by - News

stapThe advanced threat detection market may experience a boost on the back of increasingly sophisticated financial and intellectual property theft, according to a report from IDC.

Malware is becoming increasingly specific and stealthy, and is able to dodge signature based defence – and code writers understand that highly targeted attacks are even more difficult to detect.

Reacting to this, there has been the emergence of a new suite of products that go beyond the traditional signature based defences. IDC calls these products Specialised Threat Analysis and Protection, or STAP, which use mostly signature-free tech like sandboxing, emulation, and big data analytics to detect malware.

These can be based on the network level or at the endpoint, or both, and look for both inbound and outband traffic – scanning for anomalies in this data.

STAP products, IDC believes, should have a compound annual growth rate of 42.2 percent from 2012 to 2017, with revenues approaching $1.17 billion in 2017.

According to IDC research manager John Grady, they have become a “strategic necessity for many organisations, especially in the financial services and government sectors, with budget being quickly allocated to prioritise deployment”.

 

Intel talks up the PC market

Posted on August 15, 2013 by - News

Intel-logoIntel is in the middle of a leadership change  and on top of that it is facing headwinds coming from all directions. The chipmaker finally seems to be getting it, at least if statements from CEO Brian Krzanich and President Renee James are anything to go by, and they are.

However, although the new Intel is all about Atom and hybrids, the company is still trying to put a positive spin on dismal PC sales. Intel commissioned an IDC survey of 3,997 US adults which apparently found that the PC is still alive and well. We beg to differ.

The survey found that 97 percent of respondents still believe their PCs are their primary computing devices, not smartphones or tablets. They consider access to their PC essential and 73 percent said they would rather go without exercise than without their PC. Geeks aren’t into exercise, but they are into candy and sweets, yet 71 percent said they would rather ditch their sugary treats than their PCs. Another 65 percent said the same about caffeine, 58 percent would rather ditch their TV, while 33 percent would rather spend a few days without their car than without their PC. The average time spent on computing devices was 43 hours a week and half of that was spent in front of a PC.

However, these figures don’t matter nearly as much as the next one – the average PC is four years old. Just a few years ago this would mean that the average PC is ripe for an upgrade, but this is no longer the case. The upgrade cycle has slowed down and average users have little to gain from getting a new PC. Professionals and gamers are a different breed, but the bulk of PC purchases comes from mainstream users.

Over the last decade or so the PC has become so mature that it is practically treated like any other household appliance. People get a new one only when the old one breaks. Nobody buys a new microwave because Samsung launched a new one, with a colour touchscreen. The same is slowly becoming true of PCs.

On a more positive note, the PC is still practically the only platform for productivity. Tablets and smartphones can’t replace it and they can’t even come close, at least not in the foreseeable future. As a result, 83 percent of respondents to the IDC survey said they are more productive on their PCs than on smartphones or tablets. As for the remaining 17 percent, we’re not sure they know what “productive” means.

IDC expects further IT spending slowdown

Posted on August 14, 2013 by - News

pc-sales-slumpIDC has taken a second look into its crystal ball and revised its earlier forecast for worldwide IT spending. Of course, the new numbers are lower.

In May IDC forecast 4.9 percent growth, but now it expects 4.6 percent. What’s more, if tablets and smartphones are taken out of the equation, spending will be up just 1.7 percent. IDC’s May forecast was 2.6 percent.

IDC cites a slowdown in economic growth in emerging markets as the main reason behind its decision to lower forecasts. Growth is slowing down in China and Asia Pacific. Europe is not even worth mentioning. However, it’s not all bad news. IT spending in the US is now expected to increase 4.6 percent this year, up from 4.2 percent forecasted in May.

There’s some good news for mobile outfits, too. IDC expects spending on tablets to be up 39 percent this year, up from a May forecast of 32.5 percent. Smartphone projections are also up, 18.5 percent over 17.2 percent in May.

Unsurprisingly there is nothing good to report on the PC front. PC sales worldwide are now expected to decline 7.2 percent this year. The May forecast was just 2.6 percent in the red. That’s a huge revision in the space of less than three months and the PC market is clearly in worse shape than analysts thought.

Tablet shipments slow right down

Posted on August 6, 2013 by - News

cheap-tabletsThe tablet market appears to be overheating and according to IDC’s latest report global shipments slowed down in the second quarter. It appears that many consumers are waiting for new iPads and cheap Androids are not filling the gap.

IDC said unit sales dropped 9.7 percent to 45.1 million last quarter thanks to soft demand for iPads. Shipments of Apple’s tablets dropped to just 14.6 million units, down from 19.5 million in the first quarter. IDC’s original forecast was 17 million, but it appears consumers had other things in mind.

Despite the dip, Apple is still the daddy of the tablet market, with a 32.4 percent market share. For some reason Samsung managed to grab an 18-percent share, despite the fact that its tablets are overpriced and underspecced.

Thanks to its massive market share, Apple’s woes tend to have an immediate effect on overall unit sales. The trouble for Apple is that it simply does not have any fresh products to offer. The iPad and iPad mini are getting old and a refresh is expected over the next few of months. Consumers are simply putting off their purchases until Cupertino rolls out something new, i.e. a Retina iPad mini.

“A new iPad launch always piques consumer interest in the tablet category and traditionally that has helped both Apple and its competitors,” said Tom Mainelli, Research Director, Tablets at IDC. “With no new iPads, the market slowed for many vendors, and that’s likely to continue into the third quarter. However, by the fourth quarter we expect new products from Apple, Amazon, and others to drive impressive growth in the market.”

A long Apple drought seems to be just what the doctor ordered for makers of Android tablets, but they don’t appear to be capitalizing on iPad fatigue.

Asus shipped just 2 million units for a 4.5 percent share. Lenovo was in a close second with 1.5 million units and Acer is in hot pursuit with 1.4 million.

To be fair, Android peddlers also had their share of problems. New high-end designs based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800 have yet to materialize, Nvidia’s Tegra 4 was delayed and the first products have started shipping just a few days ago, at the very end of the second quarter. The new Nexus 7 is out, but it also launched too late to make a mark in Q2.

However, IDC believes new tablets from both camps should have a massive effect on shipments toward the end of the year. As for Windows RT and Windows 8.x tablets, we’re not sure they’ll make much headway this year.