While most people probably assume that the consumer electronics market is as strong as it’s ever been, some subsections of the industry are hurting pretty badly. Industry analyst Gartner (News - Alert) recently released a report that shows the PC market had a rather poor 2015, despite the fact that analysts thought shipments would remain strong through the year. Gartner and IDC actually agree on this particular point: global PC shipments were down across the board, and only Apple (News - Alert) actually saw growth over the course of the last year.
In total, according to VentureBeat, PC shipments fell 8.3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2015. If there’s any piece of good news a specific company could take away from the report, it’s that its competitors likely struggled as much as it did. One case in point was Lenovo (News - Alert), which saw a drop of 4.2 percent year over year but remained on top of the PC companies when it came to shipments.
Lenovo’s top ranking put it far ahead of HP, which came in second place in 2014 and 2015 and saw its shipments fall a whopping 8.1 percent. The only company on Gartner’s list which had a worse quarter than HP was Acer (News - Alert), which saw its shipments fall a massive 11.2 percent. Considering the company was last among major PC firms in 2015, that company can’t be feeling very good about the latest numbers.
As we mentioned before, only Apple had anything anyone could describe as a positive quarter. Even taking that into account, it was hardly a massive success. In the fourth quarter of 2014, Apple finished dead last among the major firms when talking about home computers. In the most recent quarter, the Cupertino firm, which has gathered most of its revenues from phones and tablets, finished second to last. In the end, Apple saw shipments increase year over year by 2.8 percent.