2 Billion PC's in the World by 2014?
Research group Gartner claims that by the year 2014 there will be 2 billion PCs in use around the world, up from the present 1.5 billion. According to Micheal Dell, CEO of Dell, this proves that the PC is not dead. In an interview with the Financial Times he claims that the announcement last month by HP that it is quitting the market for tablet PCs and effectively hiving off its PC business has handed Dell an extra large slice of the world’s desktop marketplace.
Mr Dell pointed out that although margins are slim and and growth is slowing, his company is able to offer a complete “end-to-end solution”. The scale of its PC operations, he says, gives Dell an advantage over competitors in the smaller but more lucrative server market.
“Think about the scale economies in our business. As a company spins off its PC business, it goes from one of the top buyers in the world of disk drives and processors and memory chips to not being one of the top five,” he says. “And that raises the cost of making servers and storage products. Ultimately we believe that presents an enormous opportunity for us and you can be sure we are going to seize it.”
Dell is the world’s second-largest vendor of PCs (by units sold) with 12.9 per cent market share, compared to 18.1 per cent for HP, according to IDC, the industry analysis group. And it is third in the market for server systems, behind IBM and HP.
However, once HP has spun off its PC business, Dell will be the only manufacturer still able to offer a combination of services and software. IBM sold its manufacturing business back in 2005 to Lenovo, currently the third largest PC manufacturer in the world.
The tablets aren’t working
Although tablets and smartphones are now dominating consumer sales and Apple is top in that marketplace, the reality is that the iPad is not a business-ready machine. After buying an iPad 2, one senior employee at a public body that was considering introducing tablets into the work place told us that he loves it, but it's "s*** for work".
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