(25 September 2007 2:00 pm)

MUMBAI: The Manufacturer's Association for Information Technology (MAIT), the apex body representing the hardware, training and R&D services sectors of the IT industry in the country, has announced the findings of its quarterly industry performance review for the quarter April-June of fiscal 2007-08.

PC sales including desktops and laptops crossed 1.7 million units, with sales of notebooks, servers and peripherals witnessing a robust growth during the quarter. With strong macroeconomic conditions and an upbeat market, sales in second quarter are expected to be buoyant as well. The findings suggest that the desktop sales in FY 2007-08 are expected to cross 6.25 million units.

Says MAIT executive director Vinnie Mehta, "IT consumption in the country continued to be dominated by industry verticals and corporate sectors such as telecom, banking and financial services, manufacturing and IT-enabled services.

"The demand in the April-June quarter also rose on account of e-governance projects at the centre and various states. Apart from these traditional sectors, high consumption was also witnessed in SMEs, education, retail and other computer-centric small enterprises. In addition, the trend of increased PC purchase in households, smaller towns and cities as witnessed over the last few quarters, continued to be steadfast. The drop in prices of desktops enabled computers to move rapidly into SEC C as well. Aggressive pricing by PC vendors has also helped improve the PC penetration, especially in the households and the SME segments," he said.

MAIT’s Industry Performance Review - ITOPs, conducted by market research firm IMRB (Indian Market Research Bureau), is bi-annual and aims to address the hardware sector’s efforts to manage the business environment as well as gauge the market potential and consumer trends.

The module to monitor the industry performance every quarter alternates with the half-yearly review, using the supply side estimation model involving data collection from the top IT vendors and leading channel players.

This round of the quarterly study (April-June 2007-08) involved data collation from the major vendors and around 400 resellers/vendors in the top sixteen metros in India. The quarterly review covers the market size estimation for desktops, notebooks, servers and peripherals – printers and UPS.

Notebook sales touched 367K units recording 104 percent year-on-year growth and 63 percent sequential growth. The high growth in notebook consumption can be attributed to the drop in notebook prices and the additional benefit of mobility and space management.

With notebooks now being available at prices of sub rupees 25K, they are increasingly finding their way into the homes and SMEs. High consumption in corporates, IT companies, financial institutes, educational institutes, self-employed professionals and the Government continues to drive the notebook consumption. With falling prices, home users are now upgrading from desktop to notebook resulting in additional growth of the notebook market.

The server consumption in the first-quarter of 2007-08 was in excess of 25.5K units growing 14 percent over the same period last year. The servers market is being driven by the SMEs as most large organisations already have networking solutions in place and only incremental growth is expected in these. With increased concerns on data security and on data retrieval, servers and other networking devices can be expected to grow in utility in the near future.

The printer market continued to be vibrant. The overall growth in the printers market was 32 percent. Compared to the corresponding period last year, consumption of laser printers grew by 55 percent, inkjet by 40 percent, however sales of dot-matrix printer (DMP) declined by 5 percent. Increased PC consumption in the home market is driving the inkjet sales where as drop in prices in the laser printers is driving its consumption in the SMEs.

Consumption of UPS witnessed an increase of 89 percent on year-on-year basis however, the consumption declined by 8 percent compared to that in the January- March quarter of 2006-07.