The growth in global PC shipments continued to slow in the fourth quarter due to a softening consumer market as well as competition from Apple’s iPad and other web tablets, reported Gartner and IDC Thursday. Their respective worldwide PC shipment estimates for the fourth quarter were 92.1 million and 93.5 million units, with year-over-year growth pegged at 3.1 percent and 2.7 percent.
“Overall, holiday PC sales were weak in many key regions due to the intensifying competition in consumer spending,” noted Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner. “Media tablets, such as the iPad, and other consumer electronic devices, such as game consoles, all competed against PCs.”
Waning Netbook Sales
Neither Gartner nor IDC include tablet shipments in their quarterly reports on worldwide PC sales, but both do include mini-notebooks as part of the overall mix. Both reports highlight competition from media tablets without observing that Apple’s iPad accounted for the lion’s share of tablet sales last year — 89 percent, according to Piper Jaffray. As a result, neither report underlines the fact that Apple’s iPad sales have made the company one of the world’s top five makers of computing products.
Piper Jaffray “is modeling for Apple to sell 5.5 million iPads and 4.2 million Macs” in the fourth quarter, said analyst Andrew Murphy. In other words, Apple’s combined 9.7 million unit shipments, if correct, would exceed the 9.5 million PC unit shipments posted by the world’s fourth-largest PC maker Lenovo in the final quarter of 2010.
Apple’s iPad launch was a brilliant competitive move given that the company’s tablet shipments are clearly hurting the sales of major computing rivals. According to IDC, Hewlett-Packard and Acer suffered from sagging mini-notebook sales at the end of last year — due in major part to escalating consumer interest in Apple’s iPad….