It is unclear to what extent people in developing countries will eventually follow wealthier U.S. economy.īut in China and other developing countries, once major growth engines for the PC industry, shipments of laptops are still falling as consumers choose tablets. There is a healthy market under there,” FBR analyst Chris Rolland said, pointing to a gradually improving U.S. consumers who once thought they would get by with a tablet are gravitating towards cheap laptops. Global tablet shipments in the March quarter fell for the first time ever, according to NPD DisplaySearch. “We’ve been talking and planning about the back half of the year with our customers and they’re pretty focused on making sure we don’t take away (DRAM) capacity.” DRAM chips are widely used in PCs. “Market feedback on the PC space is much better than 18 months ago,” memory chipmaker Micron Technology Inc President Mark Adams told Reuters in June. “If this is only a couple quarters of flat growth and all of a sudden we go down to 5 and 7 percent year-over-year declines again, then people are going to get nervous and say we don’t know where the bottom is,” said Chuck Jones, founder of research firm Sand Hill Insights. While up to a quarter of the world’s PCs still employ the 13-year-old Windows XP, it is unclear how many will choose tablets or Apple and Google Inc “Chrome” computers over PCs, rather than upgrade to newer Windows versions.

Demand is still falling in emerging markets such as China, crucial to any sustained comeback. Investors have pushed shares in PC mainstays Microsoft and Intel Corp and parts suppliers such as Seagate and Western Digital Corp to decade- or record-highs, partly on bets that the global slump in PC demand that began with Apple Inc’s launch of the iPad in 2010 may have hit bottom.īut detractors point out the story is far from certain. Its shares have slumped 16 percent since Chief Executive Officer Kevin Murai warned earlier in July that increased demand was already waning from companies buying new computers to upgrade their operating systems after Microsoft Corp stopped supporting Windows XP in April.

The latest sign that the PC market’s stability could be short-lived came from technology distributor Synnex Corp.

A shopper looks at Sony Corp's Vaio PCs at an electronics retail store in Tokyo February 5, 2014.

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