shipments

There's not a lot of good news about the PC industry lately.

Gartner is predicting that IT spending will be down, and Intel says it sees significantly lower demand for its chips. Now add to that iSuppli's doom-and-gloom prediction that PC shipments will rise only 4.3 percent in 2009, and 7.1 percent in 2010.

It's a pretty dramatic change from what the industry analyst company had previously forecast: shipments rising 11.9 percent next year, and 9.4 percent in 2010.

The PC market has been growing at rates of at least 10 percent per … Read more

Updated throughout at 2:30 p.m. PST.

A crush of warnings are descending on Intel, AMD, and the PC industry this week.

First up, Avian Securities. The brokerage company said that PC makers "are being very conservative with their build plans for Q4."

Market researcher IDC is equally pessimistic. "The supply chain is telling us that there is strong concern for demand decline," according to Shane Rau, an analyst at IDC. He is cutting his processor forecast "probably into the low to mid single digits on a unit basis for total PC processor growth … Read more

One of the hottest products in consumer electronics is finally cooling off.

A report released Tuesday confirms that flat-panel television shipments to retailers are beginning to tail off. Specifically, LCD and plasma TV shipment grew just 21 percent, and 20 percent, respectively year over year during the third quarter of 2008, according to DisplaySearch's Quarterly Global TV Shipment and Forecast Report.

That's by far the most meager growth for this category in the past two years. The previous six quarters' growth have all exceeded 41 percent compared to the previous year.

We're on the brink of a … Read more

Intel's Atom processor lifted processor shipments in the third quarter but the future for overall processor shipments is uncertain, IDC said.

Worldwide PC microprocessor shipments in the third calendar quarter of 2008 reached record levels again, according to market researcher IDC. However, the outlook for the processor market in the fourth quarter and 2009 is "very murky," said Shane Rau, director of Semiconductors: Personal Computing research at IDC, in a statement.

Worldwide PC processor unit shipments grew 14 percent quarter over quarter and 15.8 percent year over year, while market revenue grew 7.6 percent from … Read more

More dire forecasts for the chip industry.

On the heels of comments from a chip industry watchdog group last week saying the chip equipment business is "on hold," Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world's largest contract chip manufacturer, said PC-related chip shipments are expected to be off 20 percent in the fourth quarter.

This bodes ill for PC makers, which appear to be cutting way back on chip orders.

"(For) our fourth quarter computer-related wafer shipments...we expect to see over a 20 percent decline. Which is very severe...compared to a seasonal mid-teens percentage … Read more

Being fabless isn't so hip these days.

Rambus and MIPS Technologies are both chip companies that don't have their own chip fabrication facilities. Intel does. Perhaps not coincidentally, Rambus and MIPS are restructuring, while Intel's business is coasting on top of surging processor shipments.

Both Rambus and MIPS, which make a living off licensing intellectual property for chips, announced layoffs this week. Intel, meanwhile, is selling lots of its tiny Atom processors and seeing processor shipments surge overall.

Rambus said Thursday that it will reduce its workforce by approximately 90 positions and will take a restructuring charge … Read more

Correction, 10:45 a.m. PDT: This blog initially misstated Apple's global market share. It was 3.3 percent in the second quarter, according to IDC, up from 2.9 percent a year ago.

Gartner and IDC both see the global computer market rising, 16 percent and 15 percent, respectively, with Hewlett-Packard (18 percent market share) and Dell (16 percent market share) winning big, as The Wall Street Journal reports.

U.S. growth, however, was somewhat tepid at 4.2 percent, according to Gartner. (IDC pegs it at 3.6 percent.) As demonstrated in the earnings calls for Sun, … Read more

Worldwide PC shipments will hit 293 million units in 2008, up 10.9 percent from 2007, due in part to sales in emerging markets, Gartner said Tuesday.

And although price cuts will occur, revenue will grow around 6 percent for the year, George Shiffler, research director at the firm, said in a phone interview.

That's a good sign. In recent years, revenue has stayed flat from year to year despite unit shipment increases. In 2003, for instance, a then-record 152.6 million PCs were shipped, but they carried an estimated value of $175 billion, or about the same as … Read more

Hewlett-Packard continued its sprint ahead of the competition in the second quarter of 2007, remaining the No. 1 PC vendor in the world. While Dell has continued to struggle, Lenovo, Acer and Toshiba showed positive signs, each outpacing the worldwide PC market growth rate of 12.5 percent, according to IDC.

HP continued its successful run of strong quarters, leading all PC makers by shipping 11.3 million units, good enough for 19.3 percent of the overall market. Dell's global shipments were down almost 5 percent--to about 9.5 million PCs--from a year ago, but remained in second … Read more