Finally, Satyam has gone to safe hands, and its employees and partners have now heaved a sigh of relief. At long last, the sullied image of the India Inc. has regained its lost glory. Though we do not have anything to do with this issue, yet while dealing with overseas clients and executives, it had certainly created a shadow of doubt in their minds and it was lengthening because of the market slowdown. The second news is that the global PC shipment outlook seemed to be weak compared to the Q1 2009 results, which stands at 67,209 thousand units, which shows almost a 6.5-per cent decline over the first quarter of 2008. It is the EMEA region which has taken this PC market down with a double-digit decline in growth for the first time. PC shipments in EMEA totalled 22.7 million units, a 10.2-percent decline in the same period last year.
April 2009 Edition
India’s performance in respect of desktops in the calendar year 2008 has dipped 10.1 per cent. And, notebooks have only grown 31 per cent, which is pretty low compared to the previous year.
Another finding is that MID is selling aggressively in the market. This means the home and SoHo market is set to grow aggressively – across the world.
Intel 45 nanometer architecture Atom is going to create a good market for itself. This trend is happening in India also, except that the vendors are not focussing much on MIDs. They are still banking upon the turnover of the large format PCs and notebooks. Probably, the vendors are not so confident about the performance of these products or their reading of the consumers’ purchasing power is wrong.
Slowdown is still pervasive in the Indian market, but the Indian psyche is to have a cutting-edge technology at an affordable price point. The consumer still thinks that the large format products are better for all purposes. Today, we do not have any mechanism, which can actually give a spec to spec comparison of the products and the matrix of various products in a single platform. I suggest that the vendors should have a common agenda and float an online mechanism to create a comparison chart with prices, etc. Till date, what we have is the individual company statistics and some third- party comparison charts which do not provide complete information.
Sanjay Mahapatra
Editor
