More evidence of PC recovery emerges

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s Compal Electronics president Ray Chen with some heroic news: the PC is back.

Okay, that might be a bit of a drastic overstatement, but there has certainly been a resurgence in the PC market with the growth in powerful gaming and VR systems, along with increasingly mobile notebooks and 2-in-1s. While sales figures have failed to reflect this, Chen (as reported by Digitimes) says that Compal expects its notebooks and desktop shipments to grow 10 per cent year on year in 2017, to 40 million units. The company made this declaration during its investor’s conference on March 28th. 

Chen did however clarify that there would be a slight dip for the first quarter, before momentum grows throughout the rest of the year. He also noted that the company expects the shortage of DRAM and SSDs will remain this year. Chen said that the SSD shortage is due to the market shifting away from HDDs, and DRAM production is down to vendors who are reducing supply in order to inflate prices. 

IDC had previously predicted a positive 2017 for tablets and notebooks, and Digitimes had reported that notebook vendors had seen sales increase by almost a quarter year-on-year for February. This will all hopefully mean that the PC’s ‘decade of decline’ can be avoided.