IDC Sees Malaysia’s 2009 Client PC Market To Contract For The First Time In Ten Years

Kuala Lumpur, April 06, 2009 – Results from IDC’s Asia/Pacific Quarterly PC Tracker, 4Q 2008, indicate that the Malaysian client PC market dropped 19.7% sequentially but grew 4.9% year-on-year to reach 493,000 units in 4Q08. With the continuing uncertainties of the global economic crisis, IDC expects the market’s 2009 year-on-year growth to contract for the first time since the Asian Financial Crisis hit in 3Q98, by 1.0%.

“The significant quarter-on-quarter decline in 4Q08 was due to the overall bleak market sentiments. News on job retrenchments, pay cuts and businesses shutting down dramatically affected PC sales in the retail space. Malaysian consumers opt to prolong the usage and refresh cycles of PCs in the effort to cut excessive spending,” said Jaygan Fu Ponnudurai, Market Analyst for Personal Systems Research at IDC Malaysia. “The commercial segment also suffered when organizations in the trading and manufacturing sector cut back on unnecessary spending to stay afloat in these torrid times,” he added.

With the fall in demand from both the commercial and consumer segments, channel partners started to actively clear surplus inventory from 3Q08, through price rebates and year-end promotions, before placing new shipment orders. This change in inventory orders from channel partners led to a large contraction of PC shipments in 4Q08.

Jaygan added, “In the final quarter of 2008, we saw channel partners shifting their focus from chasing PC vendors' lucrative commissions on targets, to keeping their own businesses afloat. Placements of new inventory were modest and constant monitoring of account receivables to ensure timely payments from retailers and corporate resellers, became crucial to the business bottom lines for most PC channel partners.”

During 2009, IDC expects PC vendors and channel players to aggressively target the remaining few green fields in the market – mainly the mid to higher income earners, who may continue to spend despite the economic slowdown. The uncertain economy will change the spending patterns of both consumers and enterprises. Throughout 2009, IDC expects both segments to prolong existing PC usage with memory and hard disk upgrades until replacement units are absolutely necessary, causing the market to contract by 1% for the year.

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For more information about this research, kindly contact Lizzie at 603-2169-7536 or eshunmugam@idc.com.

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Contact

Jaygan Fu Ponnudurai
Market Analyst
Tel: +603 2169 7543
Email:jponnudurai@idc.com

Gowri Mohanadas
Senior Marketing Executive
Tel: +603-2169-7533
Email:gmohanadas@idc.com

Belinda Yap
Marketing Executive
Tel: +603-2169 7512
Email:byap@idc.com