Image Source: Indian Express

The pandemic has given way to a new working culture across the globe. Since the nationwide lockdown, everyone is staying indoors and working from home. This has increased dependency on laptops more than ever before. The latest report from Canalys shows demand for notebooks and tablets has gone up but despite that shipments of desktops, notebooks, tablets and workstations in India fell 33 per cent year on year in Q2 2020 to reach 2.9 million units.

The report reveals that due to falling demand and preference for notebooks, desktops underperformed with shipments halving from Q2 2019, down from 884,000 to 440,000. However, shipments of notebooks also shrunk 32 per cent year on year while tablets performed better than average with shipments down 9 per cent to 740,000 units.

Lenovo leads the list by shipping 818,000 PCs while the tablet business accounts for 29 per cent of its total shipments this quarter. HP occupies the second position by shipping only 692,000 units. HP, however, leads the individual categories of desktops and notebooks with shipments of 572,000 and 119,000 units respectively.

Dell takes the third-placed despite a year-on-year dip of 20 per cent while Samsung occupies fourth place with 173,000 units and was the only company to see growth in shipments. The fifth-place is taken by Acer with shipments decrease by 46 per cent and this is because it �prioritized other markets outside of India�.

Canalys Research Analyst Varun Kannan said that despite the shipments drop Q2 2020 was a strong quarter for PCs. �Discounting Lenovo�s ELCOT deal in Q2 2019 with the Government of Tamil Nadu, notebooks have actually grown 15 per cent compared with the same period last year. Given that the quarter had just 45 operational days, that is an incredible feat,� Kannan said. IT companies such as TCS, HCL, Infosys and Wipro also announced arrangements for employees to work from home.

�The COVID-19 pandemic forced most IT companies in India to forego their strict office-based working policies in favor of adopting new hybrid working arrangements to ensure business continuity during the lockdown. This led to panic-buying of PCs and accessories, cleaning out inventories almost everywhere in the country. The days of writing off inventory with markdowns and discounts have vanished,� Kannan added.

�A slow return to normal will prompt many companies to reduce spending or even downsize, which will have a rollover effect on IT expenditure. But online learning will remain a bright spot in the coming quarters, driven by government and private technology companies� initiatives, and PC hardware vendors should follow up quickly to capture the opportunities arising in this segment,� he further added.