Notebooks to spur growth in PC market

The world’s personal computer market is expected to expand 4 percent in 2012, up from the estimated 0.5 percent growth reached last year, largely due to more global demand for laptops, a report showed yesterday.

Mirae Asset Securities released a report predicting the global PC market will see its growth rate improve through 2013.

“We do not expect Microsoft’s expected new operating system Windows 8 to be a demand driver for the PC market in 2012,” said Roxy Wong, the regional head of technology at the securities firm.

“For 2012, the desktop PC market will decline 2.6 percent on-year, and the notebook market will grow 8.3 percent.”

The companies in the supply chain of smart mobile devices should continue to benefit from the secular trend of smartphones and tablets with above-normal seasonal growth in the first quarter of 2012, Mirae Asset predicted.

The PC market was affected by a shortage in hard disk drives after the Thailand floods in October, and this will likely continue into at least January and February, the report said.

It further said that consumers may consider buying the Windows 8-based PCs if their PCs are too old or out of order, or there is positive initial feedback with no glitches after the launch.

“We expect the corporate buyers to take more than a year before they consider migrating [to the new operating system]. It is too costly to do it if a company cannot justify the added value of migrating to the new platform, especially when most companies only replaced their PCs in 2010 and 2011,” Wong said.

The Mirae Asset report added that as PCs and other mobile devices converge further using the same hardware platform, differences will become more ambiguous. Yonhap