Global computer shipments are expected to grow faster than expected this year, backed by rapidly growing demand for consumer laptops such as ultra low-cost PCs in emerging markets and strong sales in Europe, market researcher International Data Corp (IDC) said yesterday.
Built on this improved market sentiment, IDC raised it global PC shipment growth for this year by 2.6 percentage points to 15.4 percent annually, compared with the 12.8 percent predicted three months ago.
Global notebook computer shipments will rise 34.5 percent this year, compared with IDC’s earlier estimate of 26.2 percent, as more PC users replace their desktop computers with laptops, the Framingham, Massachusetts-based researcher said.
“Consumer portables are growing very rapidly in emerging markets in Asia Pacific, in Eastern Europe and also in Latin America,” Bob O’Donnell, a vice president of IDC, told the Taipei Times in a telephone interview yesterday.
Besides, PC sales in Western Europe were stronger than IDC’s expectations during the first quarter, O’Donnell said.
However, IDC slightly lowered its forecast for PC shipments to the US in light of a weak US economy slowed by the lingering sub-prime mortgage crisis, he said.
US shipments may climb about 5.5 percent this year, slower than the 6.9 percent it projected earlier this year, IDC predicted.
Acer Inc, the world’s No.3 PC maker, said on Tuesday that the overall demand this year looked even better than it expected.
“Demand in the US, a market people are concerned with most, also looks quite good,” Acer chairman Wang Jeng-tang (王振堂) said at the time.
In total, global PC shipments this year may expand to 145 million units including ultra low-cost notebooks.
This is the first time IDC has included ultra low-cost PCs in its PC projection, but the impact of that will be very small, the report said.
“We are very conservative about that market [for ultra low-cost PCs]. Less [optimistic] than many others,” O’Donnell said.
He retained his forecast for the shipments of ultra low-cost laptops at 3.5 million units this year. IDC expects the shipments of laptops to grow by 26.6 percent at a composite annual growth rate during the four years ending 2012.
Acer shares climbed 2.52 percent to NT$65 yesterday. Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶) rallied 3.38 percent after the Chinese-language newspaper Economic Daily News said the company’s third quarter notebook shipment would grow by 20 percent quarter on quarter, citing company president Ray Chen’s (陳瑞聰) forecast.
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