PC shipments in Western European region dropped 19.8% in the second quarter of 2013, according to Gartner.
The research firm said sales had fallen to 10.9 million units from 13,643 million for the same period in 2012, while mobile and desktop PC shipments fell 23.9% and 12.2% respectively.
PC shipments in the professional market decreased 13.5%, while the consumer PC market fell 25.8%.
Gartner principal research analyst Meike Escherich said: "The market exit of the netbook PC, and vendors reducing their inventory to get the new Intel chips and Windows 8.1 have fuelled the decline in Western Europe."
HP was the top vendor with 2.28 million units in Q2 2013 despite a 17.4% decline in shipments, when compared to 2.76 million units for the same period last year.
Acer came second, followed by Lenovo, Dell, Asus and other firms.
Escherich said: "We can expect some attractive new PCs in the stores for the fourth quarter of 2013, running Windows 8.1 with thinner form factors and longer battery life enabled by Intel’s Haswell processors."
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"These PCs will compete with high-end tablets and will be complemented by a new generation of Atom-based devices that will compete with low-end basic tablets."Although this will not fully compensate for the ongoing PC decline, it does create an opportunity for profit in the midrange and more high end PC segments."
PC shipments in the UK decreased 13% to about 2.2 million units in Q2, compared to 2.52 million units for the same period last year.
Gartner research director Ranjit Atwal said:"During this time the notebook market has shrunk nearly 25 percent in unit volume. The U.K. notebook market totaled over 2 million units in the second quarter of 2010 and has now reached just under 1.5 million units,"Atwal said.
PC shipments in France also fell 19.1% to 2 million units, while PC shipments in Germany decreased 18.7% to 2.1 million units.
