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India’s country-wide lockdown drove everyone to work from home. While this does not augur well for the economy, the move drove sales of enterprise notebooks up by a record 105.5 percent in Q2, according to IDC.

This is the result of enterprises rushing to equip their staff with notebooks so that business can continue while they work from home.

Most IT services, global enterprises and consulting companies placed large orders for notebook PCs. As a result, enterprises reduced buying desktop PCs and even converted a few orders to notebooks.

“The demand for notebooks exceeded expectations with most of the vendors exiting the quarter with minimum inventory. Despite the supply and logistics challenges in the first half of the quarter, companies executed most of the large orders in Q2, said Bharath Shenoy, Market Analyst of PC Devices at IDC India.

“Also, many companies shifted their employees to notebooks for the first time; this change is surely going to alter their procurement strategy in the long term with a mix of in-office and remote workforce becoming a reality for many organisations,” he added.

HP retained its pole position in the overall PC market with 32.8 percent of market share in Q2. Lenovo was next, followed by Dell, Acer, and Asus.

Overall pc market dipped

Overall, the India traditional PC market comprising desktops, notebooks, and workstations dropped by 37.3 percent over the same quarter last year. This massive decline was attributed to unfavourable year-on-year comparison as Lenovo executed a high 1.1 million units in the same quarter in 2019.

Jaipal Singh , Associate Research Manager of Client Devices at IDC India expects the next few quarters to be tough.

“As most of the big orders for business continuity planning have been more or less executed in the quarter gone by, the PC market is now expected to face challenges posed by the COVID-19 crisis and the looming economic situation. Enterprise buying will come back down to earth and SMB demand is expected to remain muted for some quarters,” he said.