What's that sound? It's PC sales plummeting into abyss

The UK PC market could be bottoming out after most of the major vendors posted sequential quarterly growth, abacus stroker Gartner has claimed. However HP, Acer and Dell PC sales are still in a nosedive compared to last year's shipments.

The final market stats for Q3 2011 were baked and served today by the beancounter, with UK sales into the channel down 10.8 per cent year-on-year to 2.96 million units.

Consumers were again at the root of the decline with shipments into retailers dropping 18 per cent year-on-year, hitting Acer hardest as its sales collapsed 42.2 per cent.

On a yearly comparison, UK market leader HP's sales declined 9.4 per cent, and Dell dropped 6.4 per cent - but Apple shipments were up 21.8 per cent and Samsung grew 39 per cent.

Gartner research director Ranjit Atwal said US giants HP and Dell "continued to struggle to find new opportunities and experienced single-digit declines".

He added that Apple and South Korean conglomerate Samsung had a larger combined market share than Acer - the one-time high-flying notebook kingpin – which continued to clear the inventory levels.

"More importantly, quarter-on-quarter, all vendors saw growth apart from Acer, suggesting the fluctuations in the market may be bottoming out," said Atwal. ®