Sales on personal gadgets such as PCs, tablets, 'ultramobiles' and smartphones are deemed to suffer the "biggest decline" in the history. Leading IT and market research company Gartner predicted that the PC and other device market will still be affected by various inevitable country-level economic conditions this year.
"It's clear that vendors can no longer market their products with the mind of only targeting the mature and emerging markets," said Ranjit Atwal of Gartner, Inc. It is likewise noted that "end-user spending in constant U.S. dollars is expected to decline 0.5 percent for the first time."
Its forecast also said that though overall spending will decline for the first time and a slowdown on hardware sales continues swiftly, "worldwide combined shipments of devices (PCs, tablets, ultramobiles and mobile phones) are anticipated to reach 2.4 billion units in 2016 , a 1.9 percent increase from 2015."
"Driven by economic variations the market is splitting into four categories: economically challenged mature markets, economically stable mature markets and the same for emerging markets," Gartner's research director explained in their report published on Wednesday, Jan.20. "Russia and Brazil will fall into the category of economically challenged emerging markets while India will be stable, and Japan will belong to the economically challenged mature market," it continued.
The IT advisory company also said that ultramobile premium devices are expected to take the computing device market to another level -- "moving it forward with Windows 10 and PCs built around Intel’s Skylake architecture." The team also expects that most information technology businesses will "deploy Windows 10 faster than with previous Windows upgrades.”
Highlighting that this year is going to be a "rough year for computing and electronic devices," the press release, however, mentioned about the growth of the markets -- being "matured and largely stagnated." It also urged companies to create and adopt new strategies for both mature and emerging markets.
