Indian PC market continues its robust growth rates

Mumbai: The Indian market grew 34.6 per cent shipping more than 760,000 units in the second quarter of 2004 according to Gartner, Inc (NYSE: IT and ITB). This includes desktops, notebooks and servers. India garnered 9.23 per cent market share in the Asia Pacific region.

"Healthy economic conditions coupled with increase in run-rate business resulted in a good second quarter this year. The election quarter and expectation of further reduction in prices due to the financial budget caused a marginal halt in desktop purchases by consumers during the last two weeks in June. But this did not really impact the overall upward trend in purchases" said Vinod Nair, analyst-computing systems, Gartner India. Consumer, education and small and medium business contributed a large part of the shipment this quarter.

While desktops registered 32 per cent growth, notebooks grew steadily at 123 per cent. Notebooks constituted 5 per cent of the total shipments this quarter. Nair commented, "Narrowing price differential between desktops and notebooks has catalysed notebook purchases especially within the small and medium businesses segment". He suggested that the next step for vendors would be to provide attractive finance schemes with monthly instalments comparable to those of consumer durable goods. This would increase affordability and further expand the PC buying audience.

From a market share perspective, Hewlett-Packard maintained top position with 14.9 per cent followed by HCL with 11.9 per cent. Increased focus on the consumer segment has helped both these players increase their market shares. IBM also improved its market share this quarter with better business from the medium business segment.

Note: Data includes deskbased PCs, mobile PCs, and IA32 servers