iSuppli cuts forecast for PC market growth

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 year for the past six years, but all that will change because of the severity of the current economic situation, iSuppli said Thursday.

The credit crunch that has already done in the likes of Circuit City, will continue to affect large PC makers, component suppliers, as well as consumers, the people who buy these PCs.

"The result of the financial turmoil is less money to spend, and often that money is itself more expensive," said Matthew Wilkins, principal analyst of computer platforms for iSuppli. "With less money to spend, application markets, like PCs, have been impacted."

Despite the dreary picture iSuppli paints, Hewlett-Packard, the world's largest PC supplier, says its third-quarter revenue is expected to improve 19 percent over the same quarter's results a year ago.