PC market experiencing its sharpest sales decline in years

2022 has been rough for the desktop crowd

The PC market is currently experiencing its sharpest revenue decline in almost 10 years, that’s according to the findings of a new report compiled by the number-crunchers over at analysis website Gartner.

During the second quarter of 2022, PC hardware and software shipments declined by a little over 12% year-on-year with the European, Middle East, and African markets (EMEA) dropping by a huge 18% in PC shipments and 20% in laptop shipments. Almost every major player in the industry has seen losses, including HP, Dell, Acer, Lenovo, and Asus. Only Apple saw any recent growth, with a 9.3% sales increase over the same period in 2021.

Gartner’s analysts have pointed to numerous global factors in decreasing the production, distribution, and purchase of PC products.

“The decline we saw in the first quarter of 2022 has accelerated in the second quarter, driven by the ongoing geopolitical instability caused by the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, inflationary pressure on spending, and a steep downturn in demand for Chromebooks,” writes Gartner research director Mikako Kitagawa. “Supply chain disruptions also continued, but the major cause of PC delivery delays changed from component shortages to logistics disruptions.”

In addition to the invasion of Ukraine, ongoing woes involving scaled-down production of components, and distribution issues due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. These factors have also impacted the console market, resulting in decreased sales for both PlayStation and Xbox platforms. Unfortunately, Gartner believes that the PC market’s solution to decreasing sales will be to raise selling prices across the industry, offsetting the lost profit in any and all forthcoming sales. PC purchases are, of course, hardly the cheapest of buys, and with an increasing cost of living crisis, brand new GPUs are unlikely to be sitting at the top of a lot of people’s shopping lists. Quite understandably.

Of course, this is not any sign that the PC market is “dying.” The industry still shifted over 72 million hardware and software units in the past quarter, and PCs, laptops, notebooks, and other devices will remain an essential part of both the gaming industry and the working environment for decades to come, but it certainly seems that the technology industry, in general, is smarting from the ongoing stresses of the past several years.

For more details and figures pertaining to the market share, check out Gartner’s full report.

The PC market has declined at its fastest rate in years, report states [Eurogamer]