India saw record notebook sales in Q2, HP led overall PC market: IDC

New Delhi

ndia witnessed a record buying of notebooks by the enterprises as millions of employees worked from home in the June quarter as HP led the overall traditional PC market once again with the 32.8 per cent market share, a new IDC report said on Tuesday.

Lenovo with 27.5 per cent market share replaced Dell (17.8 per cent share) in the second position despite witnessing a 62.7 per cent decline in its overall shipments.

Overall, the India traditional PC market inclusive of desktops, notebooks and workstations declined by 37.3 per cent year-over-year (YoY) in the second quarter, said the IDC ‘Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker'.

HP's strong performance in the commercial segment was supported by a few large wins and helped the company to maintain its lead in the overall PC category.

Also, among the top five companies, it was the only company to have a positive annual growth rate in the commercial segment, as its shipments grew 11.8 per cent (YoY) in 2Q20.

"Despite the supply and logistics challenges in the first half of the quarter, companies executed most of the large orders in 2Q20. Also, many companies shifted their employees to notebooks for the first time," said Bharath Shenoy, Market Analyst, PC Devices, IDC India.

In the product categories, desktop PCs were the most impacted with a 46.4 per cent decline.

However, discounting Lenovo's mega-deal of 1.1 million units with the Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu (ELCOT), notebooks grew 17.6 per cent from the same time a year ago.

According to Jaipal Singh, Associate Research Manager, Client Devices, IDC India, as most of the big orders for business continuity planning have been more or less executed in the quarter gone by, "the PC market is now expected to face challenges posed by the COVID-19 crisis and the looming economic situation".

"Enterprise buying will come back down to earth and SMB demand is expected to remain muted for some quarters," said Singh.

The consumer segment had a relatively small quarter since the market was operational for just 45 days due to countrywide lockdown in the first half of the quarter.

However, strong demand from eLearning was able to cover the gap to some extent.

The overall consumer segment saw a YoY decline of 21 per cent but was able to recover from the previous quarter's low with 3.3 per cent quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) growth in 2Q20.

"Online buying played an important role in this quarter; as a result, vendors shipped almost one-third of their PCs to online channels," said the report.