is the PC industry dying?

is the PC industry dying? The good news is no, but the bad news is that it's already dying. A number of companies in the industry have proved this with poor performance after a number of market research firms have reported falling PC shipments by more than 10%.

Data bleak

The world's PC market has seen its worst landslide trend in history. Global PC shipments fell about 11% in the second quarter from a year earlier, slightly better than in the first quarter, according to a report by Gartner, the US Market Research Institute, on July 10. But this is the fifth consecutive quarterly slide in the PC market, the longest record since data was created.

If the 76 million quarterly shipments are calculated, the entire PC industry is now back to the level of early 2008, on the eve of the global financial crisis.

While Intel and Microsoft, which dominate the PC industry in the past few quarters, have moved to save the decline in the PC industry, consumers have been unmoved and turned to smartphones and tablets in the hyper-Ben and Windows 8 offensive. At the same time, enterprises in the global economic downturn in the big environment, has also significantly extended the PC's replacement cycle.

This is a structural change in the market, and the importance of PCs has fallen rapidly. Look at the data on shipments from the world's top PC makers, and conclude that the industry is not just about who is growing better, but who can go slower.

Decline in performance

No one has immediately pronounced the PC industry dead, but the dying is absolutely right. The Wintel Alliance (Microsoft + Intel), which once dominated the development of the PC industry for nearly 30 years, confirms this with the latest earnings.

Both Intel and Microsoft released their latest quarterly results in Thursday and Friday, but none of the two companies met analysts ' expectations. In the related PC business, the performance of two companies have seen a marked decline.

Intel has been earning $12.8 billion in the past quarter, down from $13.5 billion a year earlier, and a net profit of $2 billion, down 29% from 2.8 billion a year earlier. The PC Department net revenue of 8.1 billion U.S. dollars, the same period last year, 8.754 billion U.S. dollars, operating profit of 2.659 billion U.S. dollars, the same period last year, 3.44 billion U.S. dollars, down 22.7%.

While Microsoft maintained its overall revenue growth in the latest quarter, the operating profit of the windows sector was a frightening drop. According to Microsoft's latest earnings, Microsoft's Windows division has earned $4.411 billion in the past quarter, at $4.152 billion a year, while operating at $1.099 billion trillion, the same period last year at $2.422 billion trillion, down 44% per cent.

Earlier, the world's fifth-largest PC maker Asus released its second-quarter results, when revenue received 3.3 billion U.S. dollars, the chain cut by 13%, down 4% year-on-year, a record low of nearly five quarters. Hewlett-Packard, another important PC maker, released its latest results in May, showing that HP's PC business fell 20%,pc 21% year-on-year.

Urgent transformation

The data show a gloomy outlook for the PC industry, but Lenovo, the world's largest PC maker, insists there is room for growth in the PC industry. Lenovo Group CEO Yang said recently, although the domestic and foreign economic growth slowdown, will affect the PC business, shipments or a decline, but in the long run, the PC market still has room for growth.

Lenovo, of course, will not easily see the future of the PC industry, as it is Lenovo's core business, and the sound of the decline is bound to depress the company's share price. But the company's ongoing shift to PC manufacturers suggests the company's growth momentum is no longer pinning its hopes on PCs, but on tablets and smartphones.

Intel is also undergoing a transformation. As the world's largest chipmaker, Intel dominates the global chip industry, but has been slow to develop a processor for smartphones and tablets. But the PC chip giant is attacking the mobile chip market, and more of its internal resources are in favor of the market. In the past, Intel's most sophisticated manufacturing resources were allocated to powerful PC chips, and mobile chips (the Intel operating processor) used only older production lines.

Microsoft is also afraid to slack off. The company, which has a monopoly on PC operating systems, has launched a new Windows 8 operating system, and after a bad response, Microsoft is scrambling to upgrade this version of the operating system to cater to consumer demand. Last Friday, Microsoft formally announced a massive restructuring plan to accelerate the transition to equipment and service companies.

The real problem with PCs is that it can run any software you want, but it can't achieve the smooth consumption of everything from books to movies to music to apps. And Apple's iphone, IPad, all kinds of devices that carry Google's Android system, and the App store it's equipped with, can be implemented.

In simple terms, people want ecosystems, and in the process of using the ecosystem, they have gradually moved to a non-PC device. From the weakness of the PC market, the era that belongs to it has ended.