Business is booming for computer manufacturers, but only for those who sell well in China. In the third quarter of 2006, 1.4m laptops were sold in China, a 47% increase on the year-earlier period, according to Analysys.
The value of those shipments also grew strongly, by almost 43% to 11.5bn yuan -- the difference in growth rates is due to the inexorable decline in average prices, which has wreaked so much havoc in the industry and now seems a permanent feature of this market.
By region, northern, eastern and southern China are the country's major shipment markets.
Lenovo continues to lead the laptop market by a long way with a share of 32%. The runners up are HP with 12% and Dell with 10%.
More on Lenovo in this EngagingChina post.
Shipments of notebooks priced between 5000 and 7000 yuan accounted for just over a third of the total market and showed noticeable growth over the last quarter, while the shipment of pricier laptops dropped. It thus seems to be consumers driving China's laptop market at the moment.
Turning to the server market, which provides a better indication of how well China's business sector is embracing IT, we see that growth is not quite so strong. Q3 shipments were up 27% year-on-year to 154,000 servers, with the value up 14.5%, according to Analysys.
Nevertheless, China's business community is now waking up to the potential of IT to modernise manual business practices. IDC predicts IT spending by small, medium and medium-to-large (SMMLs) businesses in Greater China will grow almost 12% to $20.3bn, making it the largest market in the Asia Pacific excluding Japan region
China's SMMLs will thus spend more on IT than their counterparts in a well-established market of Australia and New Zealand and three times more than SMMLs in India. I'm not sure what an SMML is in IDC's definition -- presumably all but the largest enterprises.
More from IDC here.
