Acer and Apple steal UK PC market share

Conspicuous consumption

With the UK economy still in recession when most others have now emerged, it comes as no great surprise to see that the UK PC market is lagging behind those of Germany and France.

The Q3 Gartner figures for the Western European PC market show annual growth of 3.7 percent in Germany and 1.9 percent in France, but a decline of 2.4 percent in the UK.

With businesses maintaining a very cautious stance, it was once again down to consumers to do the spending in the UK. One consequence of this is an apparent polarisation among the PC OEMs, with Acer continuing to steal share thanks to its aggressive entry-level and netbook strategy and Apple, despite the recession, stealing a big chunk of market share with its premium offering. Samsung is just off the list below in 6th place, but tripled its share of a year ago.

"The decline in the PC market in the UK has slowed down and the return to growth will be slow and a difficult process," said Ranjit Atwal, principal analyst at Gartner. "While the consumer market continued to defy the economic environment, the business market was still very weak.

"With consumer spending restricted, mini-notebooks are becoming more appealing as they provide better functionality at the lower price points. Most of the PC vendors now offer mini-notebooks as they realise the importance of this category. Mini-notebooks represented more than 40 per cent of the total consumer notebook market in the third quarter of 2009.

"The PC market in the UK was weaker than both Germany and France, and it is not expected to become stronger than those countries in the near future," concluded Atwal.

United Kingdom PC Vendor Unit Shipment Estimates for 3Q09 (Thousands of Units)

Note: Data includes desk-based PCs and mobile PCs
Source: Gartner (November 2009)