The rise in demand for mobile devices resulting from the coronavirus pandemic has led to significant changes in the PC workstation volume mix, according to the latest data published by CONTEXT, the IT market intelligence company.
Notebooks became the dominant form factor at the end of last year and accounted for 60% of all workstations sold through Western Europe’s largest distributors by early Q2 2021, compared to 49% one year ago.
These changes followed strong growth of mobile-device sales in 2020 and Q1 2021 coupled with significant declines in those of deskbound products. In April and May 2021 the number of notebooks sold increased again, by +81% year-on-year. Desktop sales also grew in this period but by a smaller amount.
The three leading workstation vendors working through distributors (HP, Lenovo and Dell) all saw their workstation mix change during the pandemic, although to varying degrees. In early Q2 2021, mobile devices accounted for 58% of HP’s workstation mix while they made up 70% of Lenovo’s and 53% of Dell’s.
The shift to mobile devices has been driven by continual improvements to product performance over the past few years and was boosted in 2020 and H1 2021 by changes in working patterns in response to the pandemic.
According to CONTEXT, demand in the segment is expected to stay high as digitalisation progresses across a number of industries and the need for computing power to manage complex tasks increases.
