Two "good" years linked to health conditions have allowed the PC market to regain its bright colors, but the party is now well and truly over.
For years, all analysts and observers of the microcomputer world have pointed out the decline in PC sales. For years until 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic and the measures taken by most of the world's governments completely reshuffled the deck. All the companies that could do so were encouraged to promote teleworking to avoid their employees to go outside. Of course, without access to "office" equipment, it was necessary to equip oneself at home because the home computer was either outdated or non-existent, replaced by the smartphone or the tablet.
By 2020 and 2021, sales of PCs, printers and all office-related peripherals have exploded. In the same vein, this time to replace outdoor leisure activities, everything related to video game hardware - the famous gaming on PCs as well as consoles - has also largely benefited from the health crisis. But now, in 2022, as vaccination has become widespread among the population, most countries feel that Covid-19 is no longer as threatening to their health systems. They decide not to encourage telecommuting as much and to stop strict confinement.
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Directly related to this paradigm shift, but also because once equipped, you don't repurchase a computer for several years, PC sales collapsed in 2022. The problem is that while most manufacturers and observers had anticipated a decline by mid-2022, it was surprisingly large. In the microprocessor market alone between 2021 and 2022, shipments fell by 34%. Specifically, over a year between the fourth quarter of 2021 and the fourth quarter of 2022, the decline is 19%. In thirty years, we have not seen such a decline.
In this context, the two main players in this market - AMD and Intel - are obviously bearing the brunt of this collapse in orders. However, Intel is laughing even less than its competitor. AMD can actually find a reason to be satisfied, even though its Ryzen sales are clearly not at their best. In fact, despite the generalized fall of the market, AMD manages to increase its market share... at the expense of Intel of course. Thus, while in the fourth quarter of 2018, AMD accounted for only 12.3% of the market, it captures 31.3% in the fourth quarter of 2022.
An impressive growth that AMD owes of course to the multiple generations of Ryzen - except perhaps the last one - but also and especially to the EPYC processors for servers. In this segment, AMD has only stood out for a very short time, but is growing at great speed: in the fourth quarter of 2018, AMD accounted for only 4.2% of the market, while it is now at 17.6% of market share. It may even come as a surprise that AMD's progress is not even greater as EPYCs are crushing the XEON competition. It remains to be seen if Intel has what it takes to get back into the race, perhaps with its Xeon Sapphire Rapids, which will be released soon?
