Asustek Computer Inc (華碩電腦) is bracing for a weakening personal computer market in Turkey, where consumer demand has been hammered by increasing preference for tablets and fluctuating exchange rates.
According to a report on Thursday last week from market intelligence firm IDC, the Turkish PC market suffered a steep year-on-year decline of 21.8 percent in shipments during last year’s final quarter to total 845,433 units.
This was despite a number of large public-sector projects being delivered in the desktop PC segment and the aggressive approach adopted by numerous vendors in pushing their portable shipments into the country, IDC said.
On the supply side, China’s Lenovo Group Ltd (聯想) headed the overall Turkish PC market in the October-to-December quarter with a 17.3 percent share of the market’s volume, as the vendor also captured the largest share of the market’s portable segment.
Asustek ranked second with a 15 percent market share, followed by US-based Hewlett-Packard Co in third place with a 14 percent share, IDC data showed.
“The PC market continued to be negatively impacted by various macroeconomic factors during the final quarter of the year, as well as by the rapidly accelerating switch to tablet PCs in the consumer segment,” a IDC Turkey senior research analyst at Asli Kockal said.
“While some public sector project deliveries took place in the desktop space, exchange-rate fluctuations had an extremely negative impact on consumer demand,” Kockal said.
Asustek told an investor conference on Feb. 14 that the Asia-Pacific region accounted for 43 percent of its sales last year, while Europe accounted for 32 percent and the Americas for 25 percent.
The Taiwanese PC vendor’s notebook shipments declined only 5 percent last year, outperforming a 12 percent drop in the overall market, due in part to brisk sales of its Transformer Book T100 laptop-tablet hybrid device.
Asustek shares closed up 0.51 percent in Taipei trading on Friday at NT$296.
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