Personal workstation shipments in the Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) rose 3% during the second quarter of 2013, after recordign consecutive decline for five quarters, according to a new report.
IDC’s latest EMEA quarterly workstation tracker revealed that the fixed workstation segment remained flat with 0.1% growth during the quarter, while the mobile workstation segment rose 10.9%.
IDC’s systems and infrastructure department senior analyst Mohamed Hefny said that in addition to tighter competition over the last year and a half, the major workstation vendors – Dell, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, and Lenovo – were facing tougher market conditions.
"The sovereign debt crisis forced the public sector to follow strict policies regarding hardware investments, financial uncertainty pushed the enterprise sector to extend the refreshment cycle for another year, and SMBs often opted for high-end commercial PCs, as the performance gap with workstations is reduced when they are paired with professional discrete graphic cards," Hefny said.
The research firm also projects that during 2014, EMEA workstations shipments would increase by 6.2% in volume and 3.2% in value, while France, Germany, and the UK would also emerge from recession.
