It's two Million Now

It took the Indian market some 16 years to reach the one million mark in PC sales. But after that, it has been a swift climb up.

The two million-mark has been ruptured in just two years after. Now, this is a great achievement any way you look at it.

Considering the fact that the market has been going through a great recession, this achievement is even more creditable.

According to figures compiled by Dataquest in its annual Top 20 issue, a total of slightly over two million desktops were sold in the FY 2001-02, which means a growth of just about seven percent over the last financial year. Interestingly, growth in value terms was a negative five percent. This indicates that prices of PCs remained virtually stagnant for the entire year. Now, that could be a cause for concern as it indicates that the growth in numbers could have been far more if the prices had come down. On the flip side, this scenario also means that PC vendors would have improved their margins, which has been under tremendous pressure.

At least, there was some positive growth in the case of desktops. The sales of PC servers went down by as much as 20 percent in unit terms and 15 percent in value terms. Again, this means that prices of PC servers remained steady the entire year which must come as a music to the ears of the vendors engaged in selling them.

However, notebooks remain a cause for concern as this segment went down by a whopping 25 percent in units. In value terms, the growth was a negative 16 percent. This indicates that notebooks have still to find wide acceptance and remains more or less as a machine which is bought by top management people in corporates. Until and unless the price issue is addressed, notebooks will by and large remain where they are currently.

Overall, with two million units, the Indian PC market was worth Rs 7,100 crore in 2001-02. By any standards, this is a great achievement since the overall macro situation in Indian in the last fiscal was not very good. Factors like political instability, slowdown in the US, supply crunch etc affected the whole industry to a large extent.

However, what saved the blushes for the PC industry was the explosion in the home segment which grew by leaps and bounds, largely due to the wide availability of Net connections. In fact, home segment now accounts for almost one third of the PC market in the country and this share is only going to rise. So, expect plenty of action in the home front this year.