82,000,000 PC Sales in Q1/2010

Despite the impact of the global financial crisis PC sales have exceeded all forecasts for the first quarter of 2010. Worldwide PC sales for Q1 of 2010 hit 82,000,000. This is a massive 26 percent higher than for the first quarter of 2009 and is the highest first quarter sales of PCs ever. This works out to 1.3 million PC unit sales per weekday.

Also surprising is the break-down between consumer sales and business sales. Whereas business sales typically makes up more than half of PC sales for any quarter, for Q1 of 2010 the business market purchased 44 percent and general consumers purchased 56 percent.

There is a lot of analysis about this on the web. PC sales this good were totally unexpected by the PC market forecasters. Due to the knock-on impacts of the global financial crisis neither home consumers or business were expected to buy up big on PCs—despite their aging PC fleets in the case of businesses. For Windows 7, unlike for Windows XP and Windows Vista, people and businesses do not need to purchase an upgraded PC in order to run it. In most (all) cases Windows 7 will run faster and smoother on an ex-Windows XP PC than Windows XP did. So the reason for unexpected PC sales should not be, and probably is not, related to Windows 7 in any way.

For anyone interested following are the top PC vendors worldwide:

1. Hewlett Packard (HP)—19.3%.
2. Acer—13%.
3. DELL—12.9%.
4. Lenovo—7.6%.
5. ASUS and Toshiba tied for 5th—5.55% each.

Following are the top PC vendors in the USA:

1. HP.
2. DELL.
3. Acer.
4. Toshiba.
5. Apple.

That’s it. I am in the IT industry and I found this interesting so I thought it was worth posting.