‘Mathabana Kotelo
MASERU — Local computer retailers are seeing an increase in laptop sales despite reported global trends of continued declines in desktop and laptop sales.
Desktop sales have remained steady while demand for laptop computers continues to rise.
A global study by international research company Gartner indicates that pc sales in Africa, Europe and the Middle East have consistently declined over the first three quarters of the year.
Globally there has been an 8.6 percent decline while African and European markets have seen the largest decline at 13.7 percent.
The same study has shown that customers are increasingly opting for tablets and smart phones.
Personal computers (PCs) are described as computers with permanent keyboards including laptops.
Locally however, the trend has been quite the opposite with customers still preferring laptops and desktops.
Anam Saif, General Manager at Matrix computers said generally, tablet demand is still quite low locally, while that of laptops remains high.
“We get a lot of customers looking for laptop computers especially ones with a lot of memory not necessarily speed,” said Saif.
Saif said at their two branches in Maseru, tablet sales have been rather slow compared to laptops and desktops.
He said at both branches, desktops are sold mainly to schools and government offices while laptops were mostly sold to individuals.
Life’s comfort solutions (LCS) General Manager Fabian Theko confirmed that PC sales are still on the rise saying their IT department sales trend “showed that desktops and laptops sales remained very strong compared to that of tablets.”
“Our customers are still very much interested in buying laptop and desktop computers, we have not experienced any decline in sales since the advance of tablets” he said
“Locally we are usually slow to pick up global trends so the demand for tablets is not as strong as in South Africa and other African countries,” Theko said.
Speaking about the demand for mobile phones, Theko said smart phones had also become quite popular adding that “customers’ choice of mobile phone depended mostly on the specifications the customer is looking in a phone.”
“We sell mostly Nokia and Samsung brands but customers are mostly looking for mobile phones that are internet enabled and have social networking applications”
Global trends show that Lenovo remained the best selling pc brand worldwide meanwhile according to Theko, local consumers are not brand conscious if the pc meets their technical specifications.
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