NPD Group: U.S. Commercial Channel Sales Remain Flat

NPD Group, a research house based in Port Washington, New York, has stated that throughout 2012, sales by distributors and commercial channel partners remained flat. The research group used statistics on sales-out data which was acquired from distributors and large resellers.

The vice president of industry analysis at NPD, Stephen Baker, said: "The overall number is pretty flat, but when you look inside those overall numbers, not everything is flat. Servers and PCs are down, but we are seeing things like storage and networking ahead of the rest of the market. Organizations are willing to spend money on meaningful IT improvements to keep themselves competitive."

It is estimated that the aggregate spend is around $58.5 billion, and this figure was measured by the NPD Group's Distributor Track and Reseller Tracking Services. In the top five on the revenue generating table are computers and servers, consumables, networking equipment, software, and storage products. These five revenue drivers were responsible for almost three-fourths of all commercial sales revenue, and this has been the case for the past four years.

There was a 4.3 percent drop in computers and servers sales last year; this contrast with the 25.3 percent increase in 2010 and a small increase the following year of 3.9 percent. Also notable from last year's statistics is that the number of PC sales declined by seven percent, and the average price of products in this market increased by $35 (from the previous year) to $764. The sale of Windows notebooks fell by 16 percent, and those of Mac rose by 15 percent. Eighteen percent of notebook sales were account for by Windows 8, and commercial sales were responsible for five percent of desktop sales in the final quarter.

Additionally, in 2010, network equipment saw a rise exceeding 24 percent, and only a slight increase (1.3 percent) followed in 2011. Last year, another increase of 1.7 percent was recorded.

The software market measured 13 percent in 2010, and in 2011 there was a decline of 3.7 percent the following year; the latter trend of negative growth continued last year at the measure of 2.7 percent.

One product which has measured growth consistently is storage hardware 14.6 percent (2010), 4.8 percent (2011) and 10.4 percent (2012). An increase of 50 percent in solid-state drive sales and strong growth in systems (like network-attached storage which saw a 13.5 percent revenue increase) has accelerated growth in the storage hardware market; this is evident through analysis of data.

There were small declines over the last four years in sales of ink, toner and other consumables.

According to Baker, demand will remain stable this year: "If I were a partner, I would tell my customers that this is the right time to invest. Commercial customers are willing to spend money over the short term to keep themselves competitive. That is exactly what partners need to stress in their sales presentations. Things are moving fast, and you don't want to be the last guy to hop on." (CY) Link