Are we in post-PC era, Mr Cook? May not be in India

BANGALORE, INDIA: At the launch of the much-awaited iPhone 5 last week, Apple chief executive officer Tim Cook remarked that we are living in a post-PC era.

"From the first day it shipped, we thought that the tablet market would become larger than the PC market and it was just a matter of the time it took for that to occur. I feel that stronger today than I did then," he said, referring to their pathbreaking product, the iPad.

So far, Apple has sold 55 million iPads across the globe and is expected to launch a new version of the device early next year.

If not PCs, Apple is still going strong in the notebook segment in the U.S. markets. According to Cook, the Mac has significantly outgrown the PC over the last six years.

Among factors that made him suggest that the days of PCs are over, might be the thumping sales of iPads — 17 million from April and June — a figure that comfortably outclasses the numbers of PCs sold by any vendor. Even with new competitors entering the market over the past one year, Apple's share of the tablet market has grown from 62 per cent to 68 per cent, he added.

But, it might be safe to assume that Cook made that statement on post-PC era in the U.S. context, rather than the global one. For instance, PC usage in India is still high and is expected to remain the same in the near future.

"If you look at the consumption space, substantial portion of it uses tablets. But, there is hardly any productivity happening on tablets. So, how the tablet space will pan out depends on how much productivity can be got through tablets," says Rajiv Rao, director — SMB, Lenovo India.

To butress his argument, he points to the fact that still organizations rely on PCs for high productivity, which means that it would demand a change in mindset and better capabilities on tablets to reverse the trend.

Also read: Is it the beginning of the end of PC era?

A latest study by research agency IDC suggests that computer shipments in India registered 2.86 million units till June 2012 and grew by 15.7 per cent compared with the same period last year. Furthermore, IDC associate research director Adwaita Govind Menon enunciated at that point that IDC foresaw Q3 2012 (July-September) to be the strongest period of PC sales in India.

According to the report, Lenovo had the market-leading vendor share in India, with 17.1 percent in Q2 2012, followed by HP at 13.7 per cent.

However, "tablet shipments will double in 2012. This is excluding Aakash, (a sub- $50 tablet) and similar government initiatives", Menon had said, adding that the size of the tablet market was just about 3 per cent of the PC market and stood at around 0.31 million units.

There is a good chance for the competition between notebooks and PCs to intensify further, before tablets taken on desktop computers head on, observes Shiv Putcha, principal analyst, Emerging Markets at Ovum. Revealing that smartphones sales are very close to that of PCs currently (at 15-20 million), he adds that PCs are not going to go away in near future. And, instead of laptops, people might go for tablets in a year, says Putcha.

"While I can't quantify the timeline when sales of tablets might surpass that of PCs in India, it would take a considerable time for that to happen," he explains.