“I estimate an over 10% growth in PC sales, Romania is a big market so it should get to one million computers a year. A decline is expected for the tablet market but will be so slight that we may probably say the market will be flat at about one million units,” Aurel Netin, Lenovo country manager for Romania, Bulgaria and Moldova, told ZF in an interview.
Smartphone sales should see double-digit growth, he added.
Lenovo sold one quarter of the PCs purchased in Romania last year, and was the leader of a market where its rivals include Asus, Dell and HP.
The market had two good months and one slow month in the first quarter of 2015.
“This year started very well, but a strange relaxation followed after January and the market bounced back in March,” Aurel Netin said.
The market should grow as a result of the economic growth estimated at 3%, as well as of the EU funded projects and of the potential contracts of the public sector.
“The growth would be higher if the public sector sent a signal, because there haven’t been any major infrastructure projects in several years.”
One of the factors inhibiting the growth of the market is the dollar/euro exchange rate.
“One cannot ignore such a serious depreciation.”
Sales of computers rose by 28% to 781,000 units in 2014, driven by the economic growth, by a shift from tablets to PCs on the part of customers, a campaign conducted by Microsoft and some changes in how market research company IDC calculates its statistics.
“Desktops accounted for about 30% of the total, 240,000 units.”
Lenovo’s country manager explained that part of the growth was because IDC decided to count sales of AMD and Intel CPUs in Romania as computers. The reason was that given the new technology used in those CPUs, they could only be installed in new computers.
Intel and AMD do not provide data about their sales in Romania, so the only known information is that Intel is in the lead.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)