Global PC shipments up 9.3 pc in Oct-Dec in AI era

New Delhi, Jan 20 (IANS) PC shipments reached 71.5 million units globally in the fourth quarter of 2025 -- a 9.3 per cent increase from the fourth quarter of the previous year, according to preliminary results by Gartner on Tuesday.

For the entire 2025, worldwide PC shipments reached more than 270 million units, a 9.1 per cent increase from 2024.

Rishi Padhi, Research Principal at Gartner, said that the PC market maintained healthy growth in the fourth quarter of 2025, largely driven by robust consumer demand and business demand fuelled by the Windows 11 upgrade cycle.

“Demand softened by the end of the quarter as price pressure and promotions offset earlier price increases on high-end GPUs and AI PCs, resulting in stable or slightly lower average selling prices,” he mentioned.

According to the report, there were no major changes in the top six vendor rankings worldwide in the October-December period, with the top three vendors -- Lenovo, HP and Dell -- increasing their market share year-over-year.

The PC market rebounded last year, achieving 9.1 per cent growth over 2024, with more than 270 million units shipped. This marks a significant turnaround following two years of steep decline in 2022 and 2023, and only modest gains in 2024.

Tariff volatility, anticipated memory price hikes in 2026, and rising costs associated with Windows 10 Extended Security Updates prompted businesses to prioritise replacing hardware, said Padhi.

The report further stated that another factor for growth in 2025 was vendors focused heavily on promoting AI PCs to capture replacement demand.

However, most AI PC features, such as local inference, have yet to deliver significant productivity gains compared to cloud-based AI solutions.

As a result, many organisations are upgrading primarily to future-proof their fleets, rather than to realise immediate business value from AI capabilities, said Padhi.