Better than expected
The importance of the volatile consumer portable market in the UK was emphasised in IDC's preliminary figures for the UK PC market in Q2, as Dell and Acer took advantage of HP's apparent indifference to the netbook market to overtake it in total sales.
Speaking exclusively to HEXUS.channel after announcing IDC's preliminary Q2 figures for EMEA, research manager Eszter Morvay (pictured) revealed the UK did a bit better than expected. "We thought Q2 would be worse for the UK," she said. "We forecast a 13 percent fall but it ended up being a year-on-year drop of 7.2 percent."
Morvay was quick to stress, however, that this doesn't necessarily indicate things are improving dramatically. "In Q1 there was a lot of inventory clearance and much of that had been completed by Q2, so I would say it's more down to that than an uplift in sales," said Morvay.
Just as in the rest of Western Europe, the only PC segment in the black was consumer portables, with netbooks (mini-notebooks) of growing significance.
Both the commercial and consumer desktop segments saw year-on-year sales drops of 24.5 percent in Q2, while the commercial portable sector fell by 27 percent. In stark contrast, the UK consumer portable sector grew by 30.6 percent compared with Q2 08.
