PCs enjoy revival in India as global sales dip

PC vendors last year shipped 11 million units to India, up 3.5 percent in 2011. This growth was driven by efforts to distribute laptops to children across the states as well as from retailers to boost consumer demand. 
The latest figures were released by IDC, which noted this was just the beginning of further growth in the country. The analyst firm's India research director, Venu Reddy, said: "Driven by demand from portable PCs, we expect the India PC market to register a double-digit growth in 2013 despite downward pressures driven by longer refresh cycles seen in the recent periods."

Lenovo was the market leader, rewarded by the Indian government's Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu (ELCOT) deployment of 907,790 laptops to students across the southern state of Tamil Nadu. It led with a 15.9 percent market share in 2012, while Hewlett-Packard claimed second position with 16.2 percent followed by Acer at 13.2 percent.  

Reddy believes the market growth would continue in India. "With forthcoming elections in 10 states, there is a possibility such special projects [will be] repeated in a few of the larger states, which may drive the PC market upward."
This contradicted recent global trends. According to a January report by Gartner, 90.3 million PCs were shipped in the fourth quarter of 2012, dipping 4.9 percent from 2011. This declined signaled a fundamental shift, according to Gartner principle analyst, Mikako Kitagawa. "Whereas as once we imagined a world in which individual users would have both a PC and a tablet as personal devices, we increasingly suspect that most individuals will shift consumption activity to a personal tablet, and perform creative and administrative tasks on a shared PC.
"Buyers will not replace secondary PCs in the household, instead allowing them to age out and shifting consumption to a tablet," Kitagawa said.