PC shipments grew in 2019 — first time in seven years!

According to a report from Gartner and IDC, PC sales grew in 2019 after being in the decline phase for the last seven years. A total of 70.6 million units of PCs have been shipped in the Q4 of 2019 — that’s a 2.3 percent increase from Q4 2018, according to Gartner. Comparing the total shipments in 2019 to shipments in 2018, it grew 0.6 percent in the last year — which translates to shipment of 261.2 million units in 2019.

IDC data is a bit different from that of the Gartner. According to IDC, the Q4 shipments came in at 71.8 million units, which represents 4.8 percent growth. A total of 266.69 million PCs have been shipped which means — that’s 2.7 percent growth year-over-year.

Gartner’s data is slightly different from that of the IDC because of their different methodologies in calculating the shipments. “Gartner’s data includes desk-based PCs, notebook PCs and ultramobile premiums (such as Microsoft Surface), but not Chromebooks or iPads. IDC counts desktops, notebooks (including Chromebooks) and workstations, but not tablets or x86 Servers,” ZDNet reported.

“The PC market experienced growth for the first time since 2011, driven by vibrant business demand for Windows 10 upgrades, particularly in the U.S., EMEA, and Japan,” Mikako Kitagawa, senior principal analyst at Gartner, said in a statement. “We expect this growth to continue through this year even after Windows 7 support comes to an end this month, as many businesses in emerging regions such as China, Eurasia and the emerging Asia/Pacific have not yet upgraded.”

Research firm IDC and Gartner believe that Intel’s CPU shortage is what had impacted the market in Q4 of 2019. Nevertheless, AMD was able to recover the damage that was caused by Intel’s CPU shortage.

Talking about the market share of PC manufacturers, Lenovo tops the list with a shipment of 17, 832 units, which is followed by HP and Dell with the shipment of 17, 170 and 12, 463 units respectively in Q4 2019.

Interestingly enough, Mac sales in Q4 declined 5.3 percent year-over-year, as per IDC.  For the full year, Shipment volumes were down 2.2 percent.