After slipping by over 30% sequentially in the December quarter, client personal computer (PC) sales in India moved up 7% to 1.67 million in the March quarter, signalling that the market might have bottomed out.
Computer shipment data for the January-March period put out by research firm IDC on Wednesday showed an upswing in the PC market on a quarter-on-quarter basis, but a drop of 19% on a year-on-year basis.
Sumanta Mukherjee, lead analyst (computing products research), IDC India, said, “Though the year-on-year growth rate of India client PC shipments dropped 19%, there was an improvement over the December quarter, indicating the market has perhaps already bottomed out.”
Mukerjee said the pipeline for the coming quarter looked good with a number of significant government-funded education and e-governance projects lined up. He, however, said a lot will hinge on how quickly the new government settled down to business.
Vinnie Mehta, executive director of Manufacturers’ Association of Information Technology (MAIT), who predicted PC sales in the March quarter will be lower than October-December, said India seems to have bucked the negative trend in the global PC sales.
“The Indian market is very sentiment-driven. January onwards, there has been a spate of good news emanating from sectors like steel, cement, plastic and others. Another reason why PC shipments may not be drastically impacted by the global trend is our lower dependence on external (exports) trade,” said MAIT.
Research firm Gartner Inc’s number brought out last month reveals that worldwide PC shipments in the first three months of 2009 were at to 67.2 million units, down 6.5% year-on-year.
According to IDC, PC penetration also improved slightly in 2008 at one PC per 30 Indians compared with one PC for every 50 Indians in 2007. Mehta, however, said with a population of over 1.1 billion, the installed base of 36 million units translated into a penetration of around 2.5%, which was very low compared with China and other emerging nations, which had penetration of over 7%.
IDC said the uptick in sales would spill into this quarter as spending held back by the government due to elections would now be released. “The government sector had the potential to spend more in the first quarter of 2009 (calendar). Some of this spending is expected to resurface after the formation of a new government, post the elections,” IDC said.
