China probably overtook the United States as the largest personal-computer market last quarter, after three decades of American dominance in an industry pioneered by Apple Inc and International Business Machines Corp.
Personal-computer shipments in China rose 14 percent to 18.5 million units during the second quarter, the first time they surpassed the number in the US, where they fell 4.8 percent to 17.7 million, Bryan Ma, an analyst at research firm IDC, said in an interview yesterday. On a full-year basis, China will likely pass the US in 2012, he said.
The estimates highlight the growing importance of China as the world's consumer. Illustrating the divergence, industry leader Hewlett-Packard Co this month said it may pull out of the PC business, while China's Lenovo Group Ltd posted quarterly profit that almost doubled.
"This was going to happen sooner or later, and the time has come," said Toshihiro Nagahama, chief economist at Dai-ichi Life Research Institute Inc in Tokyo. "China has a huge population and their income is rising."
The value of computer shipments in China in the second quarter was US$11.9 billion, compared with US$11.7 billion for the US, Ma said. China accounted for 22 percent of the global PC market by shipments, a percentage point more than the US, he said.
Still, shipments in China will probably end at 72.4 million for the year, about a million shy of those in the US, Ma said. Next year, shipments in China will probably rise 18 percent and surpass the estimated 76.6 million units in the US, he said.
HP, a relatively late entrant to the PC market in the early 1990s, vaulted to the top with its 2002 takeover of Compaq Computer Corp. Years before, HP had rejected a plan by one of its engineers to buy the design for a home computer he invented. The employee was Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who turned the idea into the Apple I in the mid-1970s.
Though Apple helped pioneer the market with the Apple I, IBM spread the use of the product with the release of its first PC in 1981. Lenovo, China's largest computer maker, bought IBM's PC business in 2005.
Lenovo may gain from China's rise as the largest PC market, and HP's potential exit from the industry, Henry King, a Hong Kong-based analyst at Goldman Sachs Group Inc, wrote yesterday.
