According to a report from Gartner, PC shipments were actually down by 6.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2013, according to preliminary results. Manufacturers managed to ship out a total of 82.6 million units and while there was a slight drop from last years 88.7 million units, analysts that negative drop can be mostly attributed to growing tablet and smartphones markets which are slowly replacing PCs.


As far as the manufacturers are concerned, Lenovo and HP were neck to neck in the first place last yeare with a total of 15.8 and 16.5 percent of whole market share, but now Lenovo manged to head ahead by jumping to 18.1 percent while HP ended up with 16.4 percent of the market. Dell, Acer and ASUS are following with 11.8, 7.8 and 6.5 percent of the market share. As far as the regions go, the situation is pretty much similar in all regions and EMEA, U.S and Asia/Pacific regions all dropped by anywhere between 9.8 and 6.7 percent.

The year PC shipments were 315.9 million units, which is a 10 percent decline when compared to the 2012. This is the worst decline in PC market history, equal to the shipment level in 2009.

"Although PC shipments continued to decline in the worldwide market in the fourth quarter, we increasingly believe markets, such as the U.S., have bottomed out as the adjustment to the installed base slows," said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner. "Strong growth in tablets continued to negatively impact PC growth in emerging markets. In emerging markets, the first connected device for consumers is most likely a smartphone, and their first computing device is a tablet. As a result, the adoption of PCs in emerging markets will be slower as consumers skip PCs for tablets."



Source: Gartner.com.