HP: Covid-19 work-from-home trend breathes new life into laggard PC market

In a world where people now require a work-ready tech set up at home, PC makers are morphing into IT solution providers by leveraging AI and cloud computing

Global PC shipments in the third quarter were up 14.6 per cent year on year to 81.3 million units, according to IDC, which counts desktops, notebooks and workstations

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A customer looks at Samsung Electronics laptop computers at the company's flagship store in Seoul, South Korea. Global PC shipments in the third quarter were up 14.6 per cent year on year to 81.3 million units, according to IDC. Photo: Bloomberg

Published: 6:30am, 16 Nov 2020Updated: 9:07am, 16 Nov 2020

Five years ago Alex Cho was running the commercial PC business group at US tech giant HP – but some of his friends worried he was in the wrong job.

“I got an email from someone saying, ‘Hey, the PC is dead. What are you doing in the PC business?’,” recalled Cho, who has since been promoted to president of HP’s Personal Systems group, which covers all PCs, including laptops, accessories, services and software.

To some extent, his friends were right. The global PC market, which includes laptops, shrank for seven straight years from 2012 to 2018 – the year Cho took over HP’s entire PC business – according to market intelligence firm International Data Corporation (IDC). Despite a mild recovery last year, the 266 million PCs shipped worldwide in 2019 was well below the market’s all-time peak of 364 million in 2011.

Little did Cho or his friends know that HP’s record year for shipments of PCs would come in 2020. The stay-at-home economy enabled by the Covid-19 pandemic saw the company ship more than 18 million units in both the second and the third quarters, according to IDC.

The California-based HP, formerly known as Hewlett Packard, and its Chinese rival Lenovo are the world’s top two PC makers. “Covid-19 has made PCs essential,” Cho told the South China Morning Post in an interview. “You’re not working if you don’t have a PC. If you don’t have a PC, you’re not learning.”

Analysts and PC makers are now saying that Covid-19 is reversing the “PC is dead” narrative. The trend has even extended beyond the office, with doctors using PCs for online consultations because hospitals have discouraged non-Covid outpatients from showing up.