Skip to main content

IDC forecasts slower PC growth - how bad will it be?

IDC, a provider of market intelligence for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets, released their forecast for PC shipments.

With the economic downturn impacting all kinds of products, IDC expects demand for PCs to slow significantly. The report forecasts continued growth, just growth not as strong as previously expected.
"IDC expects worldwide PC shipments to grow just 3.8% in 2009 with shipment value falling by 5.3%. This is considerably slower than second quarter projections of 13.7% growth in units and 4.5% in shipment value. The outlook for full year 2008 and 2010 have each been lowered a couple percent to 12.4% and 10.9%, respectively, with growth above 12% for 2011 and 2012."
We took the IDC data and plotted it in the chart below.


The three take aways from this chart are as follows:
  • Growth in portable PCs (notebooks, laptops, netbooks) will remain relatively robust
  • Desktop PCs and servers are most vulnerable and growth is expected to contract before resuming its upward trend
  • The overall worldwide trend is still up
The bottom line is that PC growth may slow in certain segments but worldwide total sales will slowly continue on their upward trajectory and begin to accelerate after 2009. Considering the current state of the economy, that's pretty good news for PC, disk drive and semiconductor manufacturers.

On the other hand, with things the way they are these days, can any forecast be relied upon?

Source: IDC - PC Market Will Slow As Financial Turmoil Spreads, According to IDC
Labels:

Comments

Paul Orion said…
Hi ,

Just want to stop by and say you have a great blog about

trading, would you mind to exchange link with me?

My blog: TraderWork.com
http://www.traderwork.com/

My blog is about options/stock trading and I will post

articles and my trading journal.

Feel free to visit and comment.

Thanks a lot!

Paul Liew
December 4, 2008 at 2:26:00 AM EST

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Time to be conservative with your 401K

Most of the posts I and other financial bloggers write are typically focused on individual stocks or ETFs and managing active portfolios. For those folks who are more conservative investors, those whose main investment vehicle is a 401K, for example, the techniques for portfolio management might be a little different. The news of stock markets falling and pundits predicting recession is disconcerting to professional investors as well as to those of us who are watching our balances in an IRA or 401K sag. What approach should the average 401K investor take? Let's assume that the investor is contributing on a regular basis to one of these retirement accounts. There are two questions that the investor needs to ask: 1. Should I stop putting the regular contribution into stocks? My feeling is that investors making regular contributions are being handed a present by the markets. Every week the market goes down, these investors are lowering their average cost. When markets reco...
7 comments
Read more

The Trouble with Trend Reversal Indicators

Many of us use various trend reversal indicators to time our trades. Our desire is to determine when prices have changed direction so that we can ride the new trend. Why doesn't it always work out? The first reason, of course, is that unforeseen events often drive prices in unexpected directions. That is something we can't change and it often makes all of us technical traders crazy. On the other hand, sometimes an unforeseen event is a prelude to a new trend. A stock spikes up on a what seems to be a one-time piece of good fortune and soon falls back. Does it start making its way back up or does it resume a previous down trend? The conflict within trend reversal indicators is that, though they can definitely tell when prices change direction, they suffer from two problems. One, they often can't determine how significant that move in prices actually will be. Two, they are often lagging indicators. As such, they can be late in providing a signal, sometimes leading the investo...
1 comment
Read more

Unlock Stock Market Profits - Key #4

This is the fourth article in a series of posts describing 10 tools to help you identify and evaluate good investing ideas. It is based on a post that provides a summary of the ten keys that individual investors should use to identify profitable stock trades. ( Click here to read the original post ) With this fourth post, we will continue another step along the path of finding stocks that seem to have some potential. The first post in the series discussed how to use unusual activity to identify investing ideas. The second post described how to use stock screeners. The third post described how to use lists of new highs and new lows. This post will focus on identifying social or business trends in order to find investing ideas. Information on new trends might turn up anywhere. In conversation with friends or business associates, in newspapers or magazines, on TV or though your work. The key is to be aware of trends and how they start, stop or change. We'll start by describing what...
6 comments
Read more