COVID-19 is reportedly wreaking havoc on the technology industry. IDC's latest predictions shared Thursday put some numbers on how the coronavirus outbreak may hurt the PC market this year with its Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker, which covers desktops, laptops, workstations and tablets.
"We have already forgone nearly a month of production given the two-week extension to the Lunar New Year break, and we expect the road to recovery for China's supply chain to be long with a slow trickle of labor back to factories in impacted provinces until May when the weather improves," Linn Huang, research VP, Devices & Displays, IDC, said in a statement. "Many critical components, such as panels, touch sensors and printed circuit boards, come out of these impacted regions, which will cause a supply crunch heading into Q2."
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IDC's figures detail forecasts that were made before the coronavirus hit, as well as after, as you can see in the table above. Before the outbreak, the analyst expected the shipments of traditional PCs to decline 6.8% year-over-year in Q2; now it expects it to fall 10.3%. IDC also attributed the decline to the transition from Windows 7 to Windows 10, now that Windows 7 has reached end-of-life.
IDC also said it's expecting an 8.2% drop in shipments during Q1 2020, followed by a 12.7% decline in Q2 "as the existing inventory of components and finished goods from the first quarter will have been depleted by the second quarter."
IDC predicted that the second half of 2020 will also show a market decline but better growth than the first half.
