One in every 50 Indians owns a PC

One in every 50 Indians owns a PC Mumbai: One in every 50 Indians now owns a PC, says a recent report by IDC. The five million PC units that were sold last year alone took the total install count of PC’s in India to a whopping 22 million, according to IDC’s India Quarterly PC Tracker for the first quarter of 2007-08. More people chose to buy the laptop this year, thanks to a drop of about 12.2% in their selling price. With a growth rate of 85.6%, laptops now make up about 20% of the entire client PC market in India as opposed to a meager 12.7% in 2006. “The performance was contributed to a large measure by buoyant commercial notebook shipments that grew on account of robust demand from the large enterprise, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and education segments,” said Piyush Pushkal, manager (PC research), IDC India. The desktop PC market, on the other hand showed a 11% increase and their average selling price rose by 3.6% this year, as opposed to 2006. As far as the brands are concerned HP lead the pack in terms of units shipped for the laptop segment with a market share of 39.6% in FY 07. Lenovo came in a distant second with 17.6% market share, while Toshiba climbed up to take the third spot to replace Dell from last year’s ranking. The overall Client PC (Notebooks and Desktops combined) market the rankings remained unchanged. With HP on the top with 21.2% share of the market, followed by HCL at 13.5%, and Lenovo at 9.5%, in terms of unit shipments during FY 07. “The country has one PC for every 50 Indians today. This represents a watershed era in the history of the Indian PC market. However, we still have miles to go as a country to evolve an ecosystem that would help to take this trend to the next level, so that the benefits of computerisation reach to the masses,” Kapil Dev Singh, country manager, IDC India, said.