While US Tariffs have created uncertainty, PC shipments still saw a decent rise in shipments compared to the first quarter of the past year.
Lenovo Takes the Lead in the Highest PC Shipments in Q1 2025, While Apple Saw the Highest Growth Year-on-Year
As US tariffs shook the global PC market in just a couple of days, there have been uncertainties regrading the future of PC hardware, which will directly affect the prices and shipments. AI PCs have been doing quite well since the Q4 2024 and had only started to pick up the pace in Q1 2025, which can be seen in the latest preliminary report published by Counterpoint Research firm.
The firm has released early data on the global PC shipments in Q1 2025, indicating a strong demand of AI PCs. Despite US Tariffs creating pressure on PC hardware vendors, most of them have still managed to gain higher market share compared to the previous year (particularly due to exemption of laptops). This however, may soon change when the Trump administration decides to resume the tariffs, which will affect China-based hardware manufacturers greatly while the pressure will still exist to some extent on manufacturers in other regions.
Nonetheless, the PC hardware shipments rose from 57.5 million to 61.4 million in Q1 2025 compared to the same period in 2024. This solid 6.7% increase in shipment heavily benefited companies like Apple and Lenovo, who managed to gain shares in double digits. Apple gained a staggering 17% share in the global PC shipments and now sits with 10% of the total PC hardware market share. On the other hand, Lenovo kept its first position by increasing its total share from 24% to 25%.
ASUS, HP, and Dell also managed to gain higher shares than previous year and the overall market saw a positive growth. Since, the US Tariffs exempt laptops, it appears as if the growth trend is likely to continue upward. However, it’s expected that additional duties will be applied to semiconductors and various tech products in the next quarter. This will likely increase the cost of the AI PCs and their manufacturers may have to shift the manufacturing plants from China to other countries to circumvent the additional costs.
This is likely to affect the PC shipments and the overall global PC hardware growth from the next quarter and as per Counterpoint Research, their forecast of mid single-digit growth rate in 2025 may be revised downward.
News Source: Counterpoint
