Notebook Sales Down 20%, Should Vendors Be Worried?

It’s been known for quite some time now that sales in the PC market are slowing, but not to be all doom and gloom I also see that while sales of desktops and notebooks from many retails may be slowing, the PC gaming community are keeping the lights on with the sales of high end hardware, plus new life has entered the market from eSports and were not exactly at deaths door in terms of manufacturers that still operate.

Yet even with some of the recent successes in the market, vendors have seen that the sales problems are getting worse, especially for notebooks as five of the major brands saw a huge drop of 20% in the month of April according to research from Digitimes. With manufacturers also seeing a 14% drop it appears that vendors are looking to transition to newer products, but trying to shift inventory from March first, which with a drop in sales isn’t exactly going as planned.

Yet this 20% is only made up from the five manufacturers listed, which included big names such as HD, Acer and Lenovo, the rest of the market and other vendors aren’t performing to target either and notebook shipments are said to be down 15% year-on-year.

It’s a strange contrast as tablet sales are going through the roof, at least for some brands at least. With companies like Blackberry saying that Tablets will be obsolete in 5 years time, even though the evidence is stacking up to say otherwise, it’s becoming harder and harder to guess what will happen to the Notebook market.

With Haswell just around the corner were already seeing many retailers dropping prices of current hardware, will the next generation of hardware from Nvidia, Intel and AMD be enough to boost the industry? Only time will tell.

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