The ASP is ticking up
April PC Sales Head South
(05/21/98; 7:13 p.m. ET)
By Roger C. Lanctot, Computer Retail Week
April is the cruelest month for PC retailers, too. Despite a 6.2 percent increase in retail unit PC sales last month compared with April 1997, revenue fell 12.3 percent, according to the latest monthly sales data from PC Data.
IBM slipped back into fifth place behind Apple and Packard Bell NEC, AMD's K6 processors lost share for the second consecutive month, and average PC prices actually rose for the second month in a row. "It was a dead month," said Stephen Baker, senior hardware analyst for PC Data. "It was worse for some people than it was for others, but generally speaking it was lousy."
Retailers attributed the slowness to inventory sell-offs and delayed consumer PC purchasing in advance of the launch of Windows 98. Some said April is simply the slowest month of the year, coming ahead of Father's day, graduation, and back-to-school promotional periods.
Unit sales fell 31.1 percent and revenue declined more than 30 percent compared to March 1998. The average price of a PC sold at retail in April increased $18 to $1,195, from $1,177 in March. The average price in February was $1,155. The increase came, in part, due to the arrival of 350-MHz and 400-MHz Pentium II-based PCs, which boosted the share of PC revenue from PCs priced between $2,500 and $3,000 to 9.4 percent in April, from 2 percent in March. Unit sales for PCs sold in that price range represented only 4.3 percent.
The onset of high-end Pentium II PCs contributed to a 6 percent gain in sales shares for Pentium II PCs, to 49.4 percent in April. AMD K6-based PCs saw their share of retail sales fall to 21.7 percent, from 23.5 percent in March. K6-based PCs last outsold Pentium II-based PCs in January.
The early favorable sales of high-end Pentium II PCs also contributed to the ongoing success of Hewlett-Packard and Compaq Computer. Compaq held onto the top spot for the month with a 27.5 percent increase in unit sales, good for a 28.4 percent share of retail PC sales. HP kept the No.2 two spot by more than doubling its retail PC sales rate and capturing 17.4 percent of retail unit sales. Packard Bell NEC finished third, moving ahead of IBM, despite a 52.7 percent decline in unit sales.
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