After experiencing explosive growth during the epidemic, global PC shipments began to decline, and personal computer sales declined step by step, with Apple computer sales falling the most, even reaching 40.5%.
Is everyone reluctant to buy a computer?
Laptop sales have fallen sharply
According to Counterpoint Research, in the first quarter of 2023, global PC shipments were 56.7 million units, down 28% year-over-year. Data released by IDC and Canalys also confirms the downward trend of global PCs, which is also the lowest quarter for the PC industry shipments in the past 10 years (except for the first quarter of 2020, when the industry interrupted manufacturing and production due to the outbreak of the new crown epidemic).
This downward trend is not recent.
According to Canalys, the global PC market ended 2022 with a sluggish performance, with total desktop and laptop shipments falling 29% to 65.4 million units in the fourth quarter. Total shipments for the full year 2022 were 285 million units, down 16% from 2021, which was a major shipment.
In the past three years of the pandemic, the rise of working from home and hybrid work has simultaneously promoted the rapid growth of computer demand.
But as life gradually returned to normal, businesses and individuals began to slow down or delay buying new computers. Coupled with inflation, weak consumer demand and other factors, PC sales began to follow the old path of smartphones.
From the first quarter results, the top five global PC shipments are: Lenovo, HP, Dell, Apple, Asus. Among them, Apple's PC shipments fell the most in the same period, down 40.5%, leading the decline among the top five PC manufacturers, and several other first-quarter shipments showed double-digit year-on-year declines.
Although in the past few months, in order to sell the backlog of inventory, the brand side has also launched price reduction promotions to boost consumer demand, but even if manufacturers try to accelerate the destocking by reducing prices and launching new ones, the effect is not obvious.
The unit price of notebook computers of around 5,000 yuan is not low, and the consumer enthusiasm has not yet come out of the past sluggish situation, and the downward trend of personal computer sales seems to be uncontrollable.
The market performance of the Apple M2 best illustrates this.
A few joys and a few sorrows
As the strongest M2 notebook in Apple's history, sales have not been strong this year, compared with the same period last year, Apple's MacBook shipments fell by about 44% in the first quarter of this year, in sharp contrast to the hot sales of Apple's mobile phones.
Apple's first-quarter earnings report also illustrates this problem.
According to the financial report data, the revenue of the Mac business line in the first quarter was $7.168 billion, down 31% year-on-year; iPad revenue was $6.67 billion, down 13% year-over-year. Macs and iPads accounted for 7.6% and 7.03% of Apple's overall revenue, respectively.
According to the industry, the next fiscal quarter, Mac production line sales will continue to decline.
Not only Apple, according to Canalys, in the entire US market, personal computer shipments are expected to continue to decline until the fourth quarter of this year, and the overall decline in 2023 is expected to be 12%.
In the domestic market, although the ranking of computer shipments is different from the global data, the situation is the same, and the sales of domestic personal computers are also not objective.
According to Canalys' specific data, in the first quarter of 2023, shipments of Chinese mainland PCs (desktops, notebooks and workstations) fell 24% year-on-year to 8.9 million units.
Desktop (including desktop workstations) shipments decreased 28% to 2.8 million units, while notebook computer shipments (including mobile workstations) decreased 22% to 6.1 million units. On the contrary, tablet shipments bucked the trend, with total shipments up 38% year-on-year to 6.5 million units.
It can be seen that whether at home or abroad, the global personal computer market is facing the same fate as mobile phones. However, not all manufacturers are not performing well.
In China, Lenovo saw the highest shipments of personal computers (desktops, laptops and workstations), but shipments fell 24% to 3.3 million units. The second place is not Hewlett-Packard, which has the second largest share of the global market (HP occupies the third place in domestic shipments), but Huawei, which performed strongly in the Q1 quarter, with personal computer shipments up 34% to nearly 1 million units.
The fourth and fifth places in notebook shipments were Dell and Asus, respectively. Dell saw the largest drop in PC shipments among China's top five manufacturers, falling 45 percent to rank fourth, while Asus shipped 700,000 units.
Wrap the quilt tightly for the winter
Overall, the decline in computer sales seems hard to contain. This is not good news for the upstream supply chain. The first-quarter earnings reports of some upstream technology companies invariably mentioned the impact of sluggish demand for notebooks on the company's business.
Chip manufacturers are the hardest hit areas, including AMD, Intel, Micron and other chip manufacturers have been affected. Samsung Electronics reported its lowest quarterly profit since the 2009 financial crisis in early April, saying it would cut memory chip production.
Global computer shipments have fallen sharply, and IDC predicts that this may continue into the third quarter of this year, which is still an optimistic estimate.
In order to curb the decline in performance, each company is actively carrying out business transformation, tablet computer is an important direction, Sanlin will introduce the tablet market and sales in the next article.
【Disclaimer】This article only represents the author's own views and does not constitute any investment advice.