PC sales record 7% negative growth first time ever in India, however, Internet users cross 60 million

MAIT, the apex body representing India's IT hardware, training and R&D services sectors, on July 14, 2009, announced the findings of its Industry Performance Review for fiscal 2008-09. The total PC sales between April 2008 and March 2009, with desktop computers, notebooks and netbooks taken together, were 6.79 million (67.9 lakh) units, registering a decline of seven per cent over the previous year.

IT consumption in 2008-09 was severely impacted, especially in the second-half of the fiscal year, by the slowdown in the Indian economy. Impact on consumption of notebooks was most pronounced as growth plummeted to a negative seventeen percent compared to a high of one-hundred-and-fourteen percent in the previous year. Sales of desktops declined four percent. The October-November-December quarter was the most adversely impacted, subsequent to which growth in PC consumption started to show signs of revival. With business sentiment gradually gaining momentum, PC consumption in fiscal 2009-10 is expected to cross 7.3 million units, registering a seven percent growth.

The number of active Internet entities increased to 8.6 million (86 lakh) subscriptions by March 2009, while the figure was 7.2 million (72 lakh) units in March 2008. With this, the number of internet users exceeds sixty million. Internet penetration by entities in the top twenty-two cities was forty-seven per cent among businesses and twenty-four per cent among households. The businesses segment now accounts for twenty-eight per cent of the total active Internet entities and households account for the remaining seventy-two per cent.



DSL/cable remains the most commonly used means of Internet connectivity among businesses: forty-five per cent of businesses were found to use DSL/cable, thirty-one per cent dial-up connections, seven per cent leased-line, four per cent used data cards, one per cent used VSAT while eleven per cent ISDN services.

Although the sales growth in both the enterprises and the households headed southwards, the overall consumption in the PC market was led by telecom, banking and financial service sectors, education and the e-governance initiatives of the Union and the state governments. Verticals such as BPO/IT-enabled services, manufacturing, retail and households, which traditionally account for significant proportion of the IT market, were very conservative in their IT spends in 2008-09. Sales of desktop clocked 5.27 million (52.7 lakh units) declining four percent, and that of Notebooks, with netbooks taken together, another 1.51 million (15.1 lakh) units with a degrowth of seventeen percent.

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