Personal computer shipments in Gulf likely to expand 4.6%

Personal computer shipments into the Gulf are expected to experience a 4.59 per cent year-on-year increase in the fourth quarter of this year fuelled by sizeable education and government deals in Qatar and big education deals in Saudi Arabia, an industry expert said. "A total of 1.55 million units are expected to be sold this quarter compared to 1.48 million units in the fourth quarter of last year. Around 4.82 percentage growth is expected to come from laptops and 3.62 percentage from desktops," Fouad Rafiq Charakla, senior research analyst at IDC Middle East, Africa and Turkey, told Gulf News. He said the main growth in desktops was coming from the education sector and Saudi Arabia was expected to sell around 149,811 desktops in this quarter. The Oman initiative for laptops is expected to continue this quarter also. The tightening of Iran sanctions may hit re-exports slightly, but he said the channels will move the shipments to other areas. Currently around 50 per cent of laptop shipments into the UAE are re-exported. Article continues below Tablets eat into sales The value of the Gulf market is expected to be $1.06 billion (Dh3.89 billion) in the fourth quarter compared to $1.11 billion in the fourth quarter of last year. The average selling price is expected to be $688 in the fourth quarter compared to $752 in the same period last year. "Growth in media tablets will eat into laptops because a consumer will postpone his laptop purchase if he has a tablet. Education and health care are growth opportunities for media tablets. Penetration into corporates is likely to happen next year," he said. According to Santosh Varghese, general manager, Computer Systems Division, Toshiba Gulf FZE, ultrabooks will arrest the growth of media tablets. Media tablets are not a productive tool. They are only used as second PCs. "Despite Intel's bold outlook for the ultrabook form factor, IDC expects the devices to garner only a small share of the region's PC market. However, there is no doubt that ultrabooks will prove attractive to consumers, so we expect to see this share increase rapidly as prices fall. "It will take time for ultrabooks to pick up and by the middle of next year we will see big growth. Currently it will be around Dh4,000 and prices must come down," Varghese said. He said an advantage of ultrabooks is the boot-up time — less than 14 seconds compared to two minutes for laptops. Intel has developed a firmware for this. Instead of a hard disk drive, ultrabooks use solid state drives which cut down weight and give more than eight hours of battery life. Ultrabooks will take around 30 per cent of the laptop category in the coming year. "The Gulf PC market reached its highest in the third quarter due to lowest ever prices amid severe competition by vendors and channels," Charakla said.