Commercial PC purchases continued to play a key role in supporting the global PC sector in the past quarter, but market watchers remain cautious about the outlook for Taiwan’s Asustek Computer Inc (華碩) and Acer Inc (宏碁).
Global PC shipments totaled 78.5 million units in the third quarter, down 1.7 percent year-on-year, but up 5.6 percent on a quarterly basis, according to the latest data released by the International Data Corp (IDC) on Wednesday.
Despite the drop, the quarterly shipment results beat IDC’s forecast of a 4.1 percent year-on-year decline. The research firm said that many of the trends from the second quarter remained relevant in the third and contributed to the volume of shipments.
Fellow market research firm Gartner Inc also released its third-quarter data on Wednesday, which showed a slightly higher worldwide PC shipments figure than IDC’s at 79.4 million units, representing a 0.5 percent annual drop.
“Consumers’ attention is slowly going back to PC purchases,” Gartner analyst Mikako Kitagawa said in a statement.
Gartner said that for the first time, the combined share of the top five PC brands reached 65 percent of global PC shipments, with all five showing stronger growth compared with the industry average.
The two research firms reported that Lenovo Group Ltd (聯想), Hewlett-Packard Co (HP), Dell Inc and Acer remained among the top four PC vendors worldwide in the third quarter. However, Asustek’s No. 5 spot was taken by Apple Inc in IDC’s ranking.
“Asustek is more vulnerable than other vendors to competition from Apple as its product positioning is close to that of Apple, especially its mid to high-end notebooks,” CIMB Securities Ltd analysts led by Wang Wanli (王萬里) wrote in a research note last week.
Emerging markets, especially China, are Asustek’s main market, but China happens to be the place where Apple has gained the most market share over the past 12 months, CIMB said.
Market consolidation in the global PC industry is expected to accelerate as a few PC brands, such as Sony Corp, either leave the business, or selectively withdraw from certain markets, Daiwa Capital Markets Inc said in its latest industry report last week.
“Such trends will benefit existing PC original-equipment manufacturers, particularly leading ones like Lenovo and HP,” Taipei-based Daiwa analyst Steven Tseng (曾緒良) said in the report.
Citing Asustek and Acer’s third-quarter shipment figures, Tseng said Daiwa remains relatively cautious on the firms’ higher exposure to emerging markets and the consumer PC segment, where demand is still clearly weaker than in developed markets and the corporate PC sector.
Overall, JPMorgan Securities Ltd forecast that demand for PCs would remain quite healthy, citing the replacement cycle sparked by the expiration of Microsoft Corp’s Windows XP operating system in April.
The brokerage expects replacement demand to be sustained for at least the next 12 months, based on comments from vendors with high commercial exposure like Lenovo and Dell, JPMorgan analysts led by Gokul Hariharan wrote in a separate note last week.
Yet JPMorgan said that Acer and Asustek regaining significant market share from tier-one vendors seems like an uphill task.
Following HP’s decision to spin off its PC and printer business, the impact could potentially be more serious as HP could become more aggressive in the consumer PC segment, according to the note.
In the July-to-September period, Acer posted sales of NT$86.06 billion, up 5.65 percent from NT$81.33 in the previous quarter, while Asustek posted sales of NT$123.91 billion for a rise of 17.81 percent from the prior quarter’s NT$105.17 billion.
In the first nine months of the year, Acer’s cumulative sales totaled NT$244.11 billion on a consolidated basis, down 10.72 percent compared with NT$273.45 billion in the same period last year, while those of Asustek reached NT$339.4 billion, up 2.05 percent from last year’s NT$332.55 billion.
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