PC Shipments See Major Decline in Q4 and Full Year, Report Says

Worldwide PC shipments continued their downward trend in Q4 2015, totaling 71.9 million units during the period, according to a report from the International Data Corporation released this week.

That's a drop of 10.6 percent compared to the same period last year, though IDC notes that these numbers are in fact in line with its "already conservative" expectations. Still, 2015 was the first year since 2008 that total global PC shipments came in below 300 million units, according to the report.

Q4 sales were up modestly over Q3, but the 10.6 percent drop was the largest in IDC's history. Before this, this biggest year-over-year quarterly decline was -9.8 percent, recorded in 2013.

"Detachable tablets" are counted separately from PCs in this report. Had they been included, it would have increased the total growth by about 6 percentage points for Q4 and 3 percentage points for 2015, resulting in a Q4 decline of about -5 percent and -7.5 percent for the full year.

Here's how IDC summarized and explained the PC shipment downward trend for this year:

"The PC market continued to face persistent challenges from longer-PC lifecycles and competition from mobile phones and tablets, despite the slowing growth in those markets," IDC said in its report. "However, economic issues like falling commodity prices and weak international currencies, as well as social disruptions in EMEA and Asia/Pacific that disrupted foreign markets were a larger factor for 2015."

"Changes in the OS market also had a significant impact with the end of support for Windows XP and promotions of low-cost PCs driving a surge in replacements in 2014 that combined with the launch of Windows 10 and a free upgrade program to delay new system purchases in 2015. Lastly, while some very attractive new PCs have been launched, the market is taking some time to respond to new OS and hardware configurations--deciding when to upgrade and evaluating slim, convertible, detachable, and touch variations vs. more traditional PCs. Nevertheless, many of these products have received positive reviews and there's potential for a faster commercial transition to Windows 10 in 2016 than we saw for prior versions of Windows."

IDC also supplied a series of charts for the performance of the biggest PC vendors. As you'll see, Lenovo leads the way for Q4 and all of 2015; HP was No. 3, Dell No. 3, and ASUS and Apple effectively tied at No. 4. Scroll down to see all of the charts.

You can read the full IDC report here.