Digital Daily » bust

2009 PC Sales: The PC Stands for Pretty Crappy

John Paczkowski — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 11:30:49 +0000

The global PC market will suffer a rare decline this year with shipments expected to slip four percent to 287.3 million units in 2009, from 299.2 million in 2008 (click on chart to enlarge). Not since the dot-com bust of 2001 have PC sales been so slow or their outlook so grim, says iSuppli, the research outfit charting the market’s collapse.

“An annual decline in unit shipments is highly unusual in the PC market,” says Matthew Wilkins, principal analyst, for iSuppli. “Even in weak years, PC unit shipments typically rise by single-digit percentages. The last decline–in 2001–was a 5.1 decrease in unit shipments due to the extraordinary impact of the Dot-Com bust, which caused inflated IT spending levels from the previous years to collapse.”

Driving the gloomy forecast this time around: The econalypse, of course, but also, dwindling demand for desktop computers. iSuppli expects an 18.1 percent drop in desktop shipments, from 151.9 million in 2008 to 124.4 million in 2009.

Grim, I know. Still, there is a bit of good news in the report. Notebook PC shipments will rise 11.7 percent to 155.97 million units in in 2009, exceeding desktop shipments for the first time ever.

Gartner: The Sky Is Falling

John Paczkowski — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 07:00:46 +0000

Global information technology spending will fare worse in 2009 than it did during the dotcom bust of 2001. That’s the grim news from Gartner (IT), which Tuesday predicted that worldwide IT spending will slip to $3.2 trillion this year from $3.4 trillion in 2008. If that should happen, the drop will be the greatest decline in nearly a decade. “IT organizations worldwide are being asked to trim budgets, and consumers are cutting back on discretionary spending,” said analyst Richard Gordon. “The speed and severity of the response by businesses and consumers alike to these economic circumstances will result in an IT market slowdown in 2009 that will be worse than the 2.1% decline in IT spending in 2001, when the Internet bubble burst.”

No area of technology will be immune to the decline. Hardest hit: the computer hardware sector, which is expected to see spending fall 15 percent to $324.3 billion. Seems even the promise of government stimulus packages won’t be enough to offset this ugly near-term outlook. Said Gordon, “Economic conditions have continued to erode business confidence in all regions. There is a continued general sense of uncertainty in the market and a lack of clarity of actual amount of toxic debt out there. IT organizations will look for ways to shift spending from capital expenditures to operational efficiencies.”

What Color Is Happened to Your Parachute?

John Paczkowski — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 07:10:42 +0000

Looking over the latest unemployment figures, Silicon Valley’s technology bust early this decade no longer seems such a distant memory. In another unsettling economic sign, the unemployment rate in Silicon Valley rose for the fourth consecutive month in August to reach a four-year high. Unemployment in Silicon Valley reached 6.5 percent last month, up from a revised 6.4 percent in July and 6.0 percent in June, according to the latest data from the California Employment Development Department.

The last time the unemployment rate was this high was in July 2004, following the dotcom bust. Seems even the high-tech world is becoming more fiscally cautious as the economy crumbles around us. We’ve seen layoffs at Yahoo (YHOO), Motorola (MOT), Applied Materials (AMAT), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Sun (JAVA), Nortel (NT) … even Google (GOOG), which announced the first major cuts in its 10-year history.

What was it Mark Twain once said? “By the Law of Periodical Repetition, everything which has happened once must happen again and again and again–and not capriciously, but at regular periods, and each thing in its own period, not another’s, and each obeying its own law.”