1,000,000 PCs per Day

On the 11th of May the CEO of Intel announced [C|Net link] that PCs sales are currently running at one million per day.

PC sales of this order were never forecast—in fact they are unheard of.

In fact, in the last quarter of 2009 market forecasters were suggesting that 2010 was going to be a bad year for PC sales with relatively low full year sales of 130 – 150 million being forecast.

However 82,000,000 PCs were sold in the first quarter of 2010 (and I blogged this). This made a huge dent in the 130 million 2010 market forecast leaving only 48 million sales to be made for the remaining three quarters of the year to hit the forecast.

At this point PC sales for the second quarter are likely to be around 91,000,000. If this is so then PC sales for the first half of the year will hit 173 million which will be 23 million over the high end of the 2010 annual forecast!

The other significant point about these sales is that over half of sales is into the home-user and small business areas; it is not due—as it normally is—to massive purchases by enterprises refreshing their worldwide computer fleets.

93.7 percent of PCs sold run the Windows operating system, so these massive PC sales numbers will be making Microsoft happy. One does wonder what the other 6.3 percent of PCs are used for if they are not using Windows. I suspect a lot of them do end up running Windows but for some reason a license was not purchased with the PC. I guess some of them could be used for Linux but I did read somewhere that Linux installs on the desktop are going backwards (not to be confused with Linux for servers, which is slowly increasing).