Global PC shipments will decline by several percent points this year, but will still total over 303 million units, according to Gartner. Therefore, many PC makers will enjoy great sales of personal computers this year and going forward. Unfortunately, profit margins of loads of smaller PC makers will decline so significantly that they will be forced to either leave the market, or significantly reorganize.
This week Hewlett-Packard decided to split into two companies: one will sell PCs and printers, another will deal with enterprise storage, servers and other products. Earlier this year Sony Corp. sold off its PC business, Samsung exited European PC market and Toshiba announced plans to focus on commercial PCs. All these companies made their decisions because they were unable to earn significant profits on the market of PCs. It looks like more PC makers will follow them with radical decisions, market analysts say.
“Acer and Asus are having immense challenges to the point at which the industry is challenging their viability,” said Pat Moorhead of Moor Insights, reports PC World. “Neither Acer or Asus have a broad commercial PC line, aren’t the low-cost leader, nor are they the brand leaders. It is a very challenging position to be in.”
According to Mr. Moorhead, Dell and Lenovo are in good position nowadays since they have strong presence on the market, especially corporate PC market, which guarantees them not only sales, but sufficient profitability.
Bob O’Donnell of Technalysis Research believes that Acer and Asustek Computer will have to eventually merge their PC businesses, creating a stronger player on the market of personal computers. By contrast, Samsung is expected to completely withdraw from the market of PCs in favour of tablets. Many local PC makers with insignificant market share will also likely to exit the market of personal computers eventually.
Acer, Asus, Samsung, Toshiba and others did not comment on the news-story.
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KitGuru Says: It will be interesting to see what happens to the market of PCs in ten years’ time. The number of PC makers has greatly shrunk since 2004 because of various reasons. Will this number drop to, say, five large global suppliers of PCs by 2024? We do not know for sure, but what we do know is that, for example, on the market of cars there are still tens of suppliers. Yet, there are large conglomerates who own multiple brands as well as ultra-large automakers with a limited amount of brands. Perhaps, something similar eventually is going to happen to the market of PC.
Are you shitting kidding me? Acer and Asus are the budget Notebook leaders! The rest i.e. HP are shite!
Asus and Acer laptops are the best!…They are the the brands that you get the most out of your money…all others mainly right now are just ridiculously overpriced laptops that you can get from Asus and Acer from a much more fair price, so the market is just trying to eliminate its best rivals, because nowadays almost all brands are just worried in charging ridiculous amounts of money for their garbage laptops that cant even run a game at the monitor native resolution….HP, Toshiba and all others are garbage thats extremely hot some of my mates had toshiba laptops and hp laptopsmelting in their desks, regarding asus and acer their only flaws are the monitor and the ink in their keyboard letters, Asus has the best durability, hell i had a asus laptop that was allways getting trown, smashed and droped and it lasted 3 years, my acer is on its way to 4th year(but it hasn’t fallen or even been smashed), so this argument from the study is just crap to influence people and with that eliminate the strongest rivals others brands have.
Don’t agree if other pc makers would leave the market, Top Makers woudn’t have rivals, competition, means they could crank up the prices of their so called “higher spec” laptops
Asus sure. Acer? I would never buy that.
I thought the same way you are thinking until i saw a great deal on one acer laptop and bought one, believe me the computers from acer are really good, of couse you need to pay attention to the one you are buying cause there are crapy laptops in all brands, but if you know what you’re doing Acer is really good it has very good laptop’s for the price/performance, it hasn’t the build quality of Asus of course but it’s still very good, either asus and acer have problem’s with their screens one is the brithness the other is the veiwing angles but for mid/high end machines they are both really good