What They Say
Gartner & IDC joined Canalys in putting out their Q3 PC results. (Lenovo, HP, and Dell led PCs to 10-year shipment high in Q3). Gartner saw a bigger market than Canalys at 71.4 million and with 3.6% growth while IDC ha a total of 81.3 million with 14.6% growth. There were quite large variations in estimates for most of the brands. Both the analysts highlighted the strong US market and Gartner reported US sales as being led by HP, followed by Dell, Lenovo, Apple and Acer.
While Gartner does not include Chromebook shipments in its traditional PC market results, Chromebook shipments grew by approximately 90% in the third quarter of 2020, compared to a year ago. Including Chromebooks, the total worldwide PC market grew around 9% year over year, with Chromebooks representing about 11% of the combined PC/Chromebook market.
What We Think
The analysts don’t usually vary by this much in their estimates. However, over the last couple of years, my experience has been that brands have been getting less cooperative in distributing data to analysts, so there is more guesswork, which may make accuracy harder than in the past. Apple hasn’t released detail for a long time and as a good number sell through its own stores, it’s sales are hard to track. (BR)
