Personal computers are far from as down-and-out as some would like you to believe, but the last couple of quarters have been particularly tough for the PC market in the Middle East and Africa region (MEA).

That could be partly due to the fact that cheaper tablets are being made with higher quality materials, which are even outselling premium tablets at this point.

But according to a report by global market intelligence firm IDC, the MEA PC market has had its sharpest decline in year-on-year sales, which are down by almost 26% as of the second quarter of this year.

IDC detailed that only 3.3 million PCs were sold in the second quarter, and sales were split between 1.4 million desktop computers and 1.9 million notebooks. The biggest knock was taken by notebooks, whose sales dropped by 28.6%.

Not only was Turkey responsible for a huge decline in tablet sales earlier this year, but it is now also responsible for the decline in PC sales in the region.

Fouad Charakla, research manager for personal computing, systems and infrastructure solutions at IDC, said that Turkey (together with Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Palestine) didn’t sell as many units as expected in the previous quarter, so it had a lot of excess stock.

“This factor was an inhibitor of PC shipments in other parts of the region as well, including the UAE. Currency fluctuations also had a negative impact on supply and demand in several key markets across the region. In the UAE, a slowdown in tourism spending – primarily from Russia and Europe – continued to inhibit PC demand.”

Even though sales were down across the board, there is a silver lining for electronics maker HP: out of all manufacturers in the region, it fared the best – albeit still at a decline, and a big one at that.

HP saw its shipments shrink by 26% year-on-year, and second-place Lenovo didn’t do much better. The Chinese company had a 19% decline, while third-placed Dell suffered the lowest loss of only 10.3%.

And it seems like things for the region as a whole are only going to get worse – at the end of the year overall PC shipments are expected to be down by as much as 15% year-on-year, which roughly translates to a total of just over 15 million PCs sold over the entire year.

“Currency fluctuations both inside and outside the MEA region will remain largely responsible for the slower demand, particularly in key markets such as Turkey and Nigeria,” explains Charakla.

“Low oil prices are also impacting those countries whose budgets rely strongly on oil revenues, ratcheting up the pressure on governments to control their spending. At the same time, the cannibalisation of PC demand by tablets and smartphones continues to hamper the market’s performance,” he concluded.

[Image – CC by 2.0/David Precious]