Coronavirus Lockdown Impact: Laptop Sales Rise As Employees Turn Resort To Working From Home

PCs and print majors have been given special permission to supply supporting accessories like cartridges, toners and hard disks etc, to hospitals, banks and other essential services to keep their operations going on seamlessly.

(Representative Image/ Getty)

New Delhi; Even as industries are reeling under the impact of Covid 19 outbreak, PC and laptop companies have seen a rise in its sale from corporates and enterprises to promote work from home. Chromebooks and business laptops sales witnessed increase even before the 21-day lockdown was enforced from March 24. It is because employees across the spectrum started working from home as corona-positive cases began to emerge from various offices at that time. "Inevitably, given the rise in the need for remote and flexible working from businesses around the world, we have seen an increase in demand for laptops and supporting accessories," a spokesperson from Lenovo said. HP Inc has also seen a huge demand and its work-from-home products have been sold out in the country, according to industry sources. "Chromebooks have seen the most demand as the data is stored on the Cloud and is safe for the companies from the cybersecurity point of view. HP Chromebooks/business laptops were bought in bulk across industries, majorly by the IT giants," the industry sources said. Moreover, PC and print majors have been given special permission by the government to supply supporting accessories like cartridges, toners and hard disks etc, to hospitals (to record and maintain COVID-19 data), banks and other essential services to keep their operations going on seamlessly. According to Thomas George, President, CyberMedia Research (CMR), there has been a significant increase in the sale and renting of laptop PCs due to the work-from-home situation. "This trend is witnessed across the sectors. However, large organisations are placing fresh orders as they provision and enable an entire process or team to work remotely. For example, an IT services major was rolling out 4,000-5,000 laptops daily to the employees in order to work from home," George said. The PC, print and laptop majors have started facing the supply issue as demand is still coming from all quarters, and hope to address this as soon as the lockdown is cleared. "There will be supply and demand gap occurring due to the restrictions around component import under the current circumstance and it will push the prices further up,' said George. India's traditional PC market saw a six-year high with 11 million shipments of desktops, notebooks and workstations in 2019 -- an impressive 18.1 per cent year-over-year (YoY) growth, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC). "In absence of any fresh mega-deal, lingering concerns around component shortage, and supply uncertainties due to recent novel coronavirus outbreak, it would be difficult for vendors to maintain this level of growth in 2020," said Jaipal Singh, Associate Research Manager, Client Devices, IDC India.