From ExtremeTech: Microsoft has broken into the top five PC OEMs in the US thanks to the overarching success of the Surface family and the collapse of Acer’s business over the same time period. While Acer remains a major worldwide vendor, with some 6.1 percent of the worldwide market and over 4 million PCs shipped worldwide in Q3 2018, Microsoft’s US performance was enough to knock it out of the local rankings.
Overall market performance remains poor by historical terms and relatively good compared with the bloodbath of the past seven years. After falling roughly 30 percent since 2011, PC sales have been more stable the last few quarters. Unfortunately, weakness in some markets is depressing what little growth exists. The US market shrank by 0.5 percent in Q3 2018 while Latin American sales fell 8.5 percent, offsetting almost all of the growth in EMEA, Asia/Pacific, and Japan.
“The PC market continued to be driven by steady corporate PC demand, which was driven by Windows 10 PC hardware upgrades. We expect the Windows 10 upgrade cycle to continue through 2020 at which point the upgrade demand will diminish,” said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner. “Despite the third quarter typically showing strong consumer PC sales due to the back-to-school season, weakness in consumer PC demand continued, offsetting the strong sales in the business market.”
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