High demand for notebooks, tablets, in Q2 2020 in India during COVID-19 lockdown.

As per a Canalys’ report, demand for tablets and notebooks has gone up despite shipments of tablets, notebooks, desktops, and workstations falling by 33 percent in India. 

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a new working culture has emerged across the globe. Since the nationwide lockdown, dependency on laptops has increased manifolds. As per the latest report in Canalys, India showed a high demand for tablets and notebooks despite the shipments of desktops, notebooks, tablets, and workstations fell by 33 percent year on year in Q2 2020 and reached 2.9 million units.

Shipments’ fall also due to the high consumer demand:

Shipments of desktops decreased to 440,000, from 884,000 in Q2 2019. Shipments of tablets decreased by 32 percent in comparison to last year and tablets were down 9 percent at 740,000 units. The high demand has also contributed to the fall in shipments, Lenovo accounted for 29 percent of shipments for tablets in this quarter and also leads the list by shipping 818,000 PCs. HP is second by shipping 692,000 units but leads the desktop and notebook categories of shipping 572,000 and 119,000 units respectively. Dell is in the fourth position followed by Samsung and Acer. 

Q2 2020 for notebooks, tablets was a strong quarter:

Canalys Research Analyst Varun Kannan said that Q2 2020 was a strong quarter for PCs, despite the drop in shipments. Kannan said,” Discounting Lenovo’s ELCOT deal in Q2 2019 with the government of Tamil Nadu, notebooks have grown 15 percent compared with the same period last year. Given that the quarter had just 45 operational days, that is an incredible feat.” Kannan also revealed how the pandemic forced IT companies like TCS, HCL, Wipro, Infosys to make arrangements for employees to work from home. Kannan further says,” The COVID-19 pandemic forced most IT companies in India to forego their strict office-based working policies in favor of adopting new hybrid working arrangements to ensure business continuity during the lockdown. This led to panic-buying of PCs and accessories, cleaning out inventories almost everywhere in the country. The days of writing off inventory with markdowns and discounts have vanished. 

It is safe to say that the IT sector in India has flourished amid the pandemic-era.