The Rudd Government’s stimulus money has run out and combined with four interest rate rises in six months has seen a dramatic fall in sales of technical consumers goods in Australia totalling more than $AUD1billion.
From a peak spend in the fourth quarter of 2009 at $5.61billion, figures released today by research analysts GfK show that consumers spend just $4.6billion during the first quarter of 2010.
Among the damage, the value of notebook sales in Australia during March 2010 had fallen for the first time since the category was introduced.
While notebook sales were still strong, GFK found that 60% of the notebooks sold during March were price at under $1000, making it difficult for retailers to maintain the same margins of previous years.
In other IT areas, storage – external hard drives, optical drives – saw a gain of 13% over the period. Multi-function printers also saw a modest gain of 2%.
The storage market saw growth on the back of new higher-capacity hard drives with some 8% of models sold having 1500GB or more capacity. Wireless capabilities saw consumers willing to trade up and spend more in this market area, according to GfK.
The total IT spend for the fisrt quarter of 2010 was $AUD825million, down $AUD30million on the previous quarter but up 5.6% on the same period in 2009.
Similar Posts:
- Worldwide PC shipments boom 21% in June quarter
- Worldwide smartphone sales boom nearly 50% in a year
- Intel reports record-breaking quarter
- Value of technical consumer products sales falls $1billion: GfK
- Australia-New Zealand server market grows 36% in Q1 2010
