A tale of two Europes
Market researcher IDC released its preliminary figures for PC sales in the EMEA region this week and HEXUS.channel was able to catch up with senior analyst Eszter Morvay to find out more about the situation in the UK.
The not unexpected bad news was that PC sales volume growth (number of units as opposed to value) for EMEA slowed to a crawl at 1.8 percent, year-on-year (YOY). The better news for the UK within that, is that we still managed growth of 13.5 percent within that.
As you can see in the table below, which summarises the preliminary UK data, this was driven almost entirely by consumer notebook sales, which increased by nearly 58 percent YOY.
The fly in the ointment is that notebook growth is increasingly fuelled by netbook sales, which at best are low value and are often given away in telco bundles.
So, while the preliminary figures didn't include the value of the sales, we can assume that increased by a lot less, if at all.
| Market | Segment | Units | Year-on-year change |
| Desktop | 1,040,000 | -21.2% | |
| Consumer | 364,000 | -30.8% | |
| Business | 676,000 | -14.8% | |
| Notebook | 2,809,000 | +35.7% | |
| Consumer | 1,700,000 | +57.8% | |
| Business | 1,108,000 | +11.7% | |
| Total | 3,850,000 | +13.5% |
