Strategy Analytics: Notebook Market Declines in 3Q22

Strategy Analytics: Notebook Market Declines in 3Q22
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Inflation, recession, and slow growth are short-term issues hurting consumer and commercial notebook demand while other factors like currency fluctuation, high unemployment, and political issues will put more pressure on spending during the holiday season and early 2023. As a result, Notebook PCs continued to struggle this year as shipments declined 15% compared to last year, according to Strategy Analytics. Looming global economic challenges will likely have an impact on manufacturing and logistic costs.

“The commercial segment continued to perform better for most vendors compared to the pre-pandemic level as upgrades continued across businesses, while consumer volume continued to be challenging for all vendors except Apple. Apple had a great quarter for MacBook PCs shipments and revenue, as they managed to deliver backlog orders which were mainly upgrades, plus MacBooks with the new M2 chipset driving sales across several regions,“ said Chirag Upadhyay, Industry Analyst at Strategy Analytics.

“One of the constants throughout the pandemic was Chromebook demand as many K-12 schools in developed markets rapidly deployed mobile computing devices for their student populations. Learning management platforms remain and are expected to drive sustained demand over the long term, but Chromebook demand is a shadow of what it was a year ago. Compare the first nine months of 2022 to the same period last year, and you’ll see that Chromebook shipments have dropped nearly 16 million units at a -51% growth rate,“ added Eric Smith, Director of Connected Computing at Strategy Analytics.

Lenovo remained in the top spot with a 23% market share and 12.8 million units in 3Q22. This represents a 16% decline from the 15.3 million shipped the year prior and flat compared to the previous quarter. HP secured the second position with a 17% market share and 9.5 million shipments in the third quarter, a 32% decline compared to a similar period last year. Dell maintained the third position and importantly closed the gap with HP. During the quarter, Dell's shipments reached over nine million units at a 25% year-on-year decline. Apple was the only vendor to deliver positive results among the top 7 personal computing vendors as shipments reached 8.1 million units (26% year-on-year growth). Asus secured the fifth spot with nearly 8% market share as they managed to ship 4.3 million notebook PCs, a 16% decline year-over-year.