India PC sales suffer first ever dip as buyers shift to smartphones, tablets

According to the MAIT report, the PC sale figures have gone down by 10 per cent in the last fiscal while sale of phablets have registered a huge rise with 527 per cent net growth. The overall size of Indian ICT hardware market stands at $15.87 billion, registering a growth of 23.98 per cent over the previous year, according to the Annual Industry Performance Review (AIPR) for the financial year 2014-15. This segment includes PCs, desktops, phablets (screen size 5 inch and more), tablets (screen size greater than or equal to 7 inch), smartphones, servers, and peripherals, including UPS, printers, monitor, keyboard. According the report, which was released on Friday, the total PC sales (desktop computers and notebooks) stood at 1.06 crore units in 2014-15 against 1.18 crore units in 2013-14. Smartphone sales stood at 6.96 crore, an increase of 33 per cent against 5.24 crore last year.

Commenting on finding of the report, MAIT president Amar Babu, said, “Phones are driving all the growth but PC is showing degrowth. The only way to arrest this degrowth is to look at ways to increase PC penetration in Indian households. One way is by enabling infrastructure, providing low-cost loans and discount vouchers for purchasing PCs.”

Adding further Babu, who is also the chairman of Lenovo, said, “We also see a ray of hope for PC growth in future on account of some of Digital India initiatives which aims at having a digital Infrastructure as a utility to every citizen, governance and services on demand, and digital empowerment of citizens.”

Pinning hope on government-sponsored programmes to help in correcting the sale figures of notebooks, Anwar Shirpurwala of MAIT, said, “Government schemes have been instrumental in driving the growth of notebook and also its decline. In a country where affordability is an issue, it is important for government to provide the additional impetus to the adoption of PCs, thereby, driving overall development of the society.”

Adding further Shirpurwala said, “The bigger screen of phablets make it an extremely desirable product as it bridges the gap of a multi-utility device and an entertainment device. However, it is only up to the 5.5 in screen phablets that have found acceptance. Role of tablets as a ubiquitous device for consumers is fast diminishing. On the other hand desktop PC continues to de-grow and found a niche amongst households in small towns and rural.”

“The report has been prepared after analysing 40,000 samples collected from the 35 different cities across the country. The sale of phablets have increased in the cities of Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata and Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Pune, while the residents of three tier cities such as Aurangabad, Raipur, Bhubaneswar, Aligarh, Belgaum have shown interest in buying the phablets, but due to financial constraints, they were not prepared to invest in the technology,” added Shirpurwala.

Phablets is expected to grow by around 65 per cent in the next fiscal year. Multi-utility of the product coupled with the ease of usage and handling makes it a preferred device over the other devices, the report added. Tablet PC has grown 4 per cent in sales for 2014-15 at 34.8 lakh against 33.5 lakh in 2013-14.