Notebook shipments—the largest category by volume—fell by 21%, causing the overall market decline this quarter
As per the latest findings, the Indian PC market (desktops, notebooks and tablets) witnessed a 4% YoY fall in Q3 2022. It hits majorly because the market was consecutively growing for the previous eight quarters.
Canalys PC Analysis (sell-in shipments) of November 2022 noted that the shipments fell to 5.1 million units, and notebook shipments—the largest category by volume—fell by 21%, causing the overall market decline this quarter. This is because the other two categories, desktop and tablet shipments, witnessed major annual growth in Q3. While desktop shipments grew by 36% to 766,000 units, tablet shipments grew by 24% to 1.5 million units.
Canalys Analyst Ashweej Aithal believed that the education sector was a bright spot for the Indian PC market. Aithal said: “Public sector tenders that had been postponed over the last two years began to materialize, driving the segment to 181% shipment growth across all product categories in Q3. This enormous gain can be attributed to the subpar performance in Q3 last year when the government was still reeling from the devastating effects of the pandemic.
Looking ahead, the segment is expected to bring continued strength, especially for tablets, which enjoy a favourable position in India’s digital education expansion strategy. But with businesses’ budgets for IT spending being reprioritized due to the uncertain economic climate, shipments to the commercial segment suffered, falling 11% compared with a year ago. Both enterprises and SMBs delivered weaker demand for PCs because of inflation and a series of interest rate hikes by the Reserve Bank of India in the second half of 2022.”
The report further analysed the brands-trend of this quarter. It noted that in PCs (excluding tablets), HP stood first in India but saw its shipments suffer a massive decline of 26% as it lost almost 5% market share YoY. Lenovo came second with a flat performance in Q3, shipping 837,000 units as it overtook HP in the commercial segment. Third-positioned Dell underwent the largest decline (38%) of the major vendors. Acer and Asus posted respective growth of 21% and 1%, taking up the fourth and fifth spots.
Coming to tablets, Samsung held the top spot with 22% shipment growth and 23% market share. Domestic vendor Lava stood second, having seen significant traction in the low-end Android space, including in education deployments. Apple came third in line as it fulfilled backlogged demand from Q2 and promotional activity helped drive 71% shipment growth. Lenovo and realme grabbed fourth and fifth place respectively.
Canalys is an independent analyst company which delivers smart market insights to IT, channel and service provider professionals around the world. Canalys’ PC Analysis service provides quarterly updated shipment data.
