After years of sitting on their cash and making do with older, less feature-rich PCs, companies in the first half of 2010 finally started updating their stable of desktop and laptop machines.
But as IT Channel Planet reports, a new report from Gartner predicts only a 15.3 percent surge in new PC shipments in the last two quarters of the year, down about 2 percentage points from initial estimates.
The reason: less demand from enterprise customers in the U.S. and Western Europe.
Still, Gartner said that it expects the aging PC installed base to prod businesses to purchase PC replacements and drive worldwide demand upward, although a more dramatic spike may not occur until next year.
“Businesses that delay replacing much longer risk alienating employees, burdening themselves with more service requests and support costs, and ultimately facing higher migration costs when they eventually migrate to Windows 7,” said Gartner’s Ranjit Atwal.
Global PC shipments in 2010 will jump some 19 percent to 367.8 million units, although dip noticeably in the second half of the year owing to ebbing demand in the U.S. and Western Europe, according to a preliminary forecast from researcher Gartner Inc.
In late July, Gartner said that it figured PC vendors shipped 82.9 million desktop and mobile units worldwide in the second quarter of 2010, a 20.7 percent increase over the similar period last year and the third quarter in a row of double-digit growth year-over-year.
Now the researcher has pared its forecast for second half PC shipment growth by 2 percent down to 15.3 percent, expecting sluggish demand both from business customers and consumers through the end of the year.
