Posted on 12/14/2004 6:35:40 PM PST by FairOpinion
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The number of personal computers worldwide is expected to double to about 1.3 billion by 2010, driven by explosive growth in emerging markets such as China, Russia and India, according to a report released on Tuesday by Forrester Research Inc.
China is expected to lead the growth, with 178 million new PC users by 2010, Forrester, a technology research firm, said in a statement.
Some 566 million new PCs are expected to be in use in emerging markets by 2010, based on a study of adoption rates across 16 emerging markets, Forrester said in a statement. The 575 million PCs currently in use globally include about 75 million in emerging markets.
Mature markets in the United States, Europe and Asia-Pacific are expected to add 150 million new PCs by 2010, according to the study.
Growth in emerging markets will be driven by low-priced PCs made by local companies, Forrester said.
"Today's products from Western PC vendors won't dominate in those markets in the long term," Simon Yates, a senior analyst for Forrester, said in a statement.
"Instead local PC makers like Lenovo Group (0992.HK) in China and Aquarius in Russia that can better tailor the PC form factor, price point and applications to their local markets will ultimately win the market share battle," he said.
Forrester forecast that there will be 80 million new PC users in India by 2010, with an annual growth rate of 37 percent. Indonesia is expected to see 40 percent annual growth, with 40 million new users.
Of the 16 emerging markets included in the study, Mexico is expected to see the deepest PC market penetration, with 46 percent of Mexicans owning a PC by 2010, Forrester said.
since everybody and their brother bought a new computer in 1999 to be Y2K compliant, next year should be a high pc sales year too since business will turn over pc's on average of every four years and now with the whole country in sync it should make for big buy cycles until everybody strings out their buys and is back to buying every year instead of every four
> Will they have Intel inside?
Not necessarily.
Most of the growth is outside the US, where money is tight.
These folks, by and large, can get by just fine with a low
performance processor like a VIA C3, AMD Geode or Transmeta. The biggest expense on these PCs might be the
Windows license.
And replacement business in the developed world is apt to
slow down, because Intel CPU performance has hit a wall
at 4GHz. AMD has the edge in most respects, and might be
able to enlarge it, but not until they have the capacity
to grab more share from Intel.
Unless there's a wholesale roll to 64-bit on the desktop,
there isn't a lot compelling people to upgrade their PC
as often as they used to. I get 2-3 years out of mine,
and don't expect to upgrade again until 64 bit.
How big is the pile of throw aways...?
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