PC shipments in western Europe fell slightly year-on-year during the third quarter, but sales decline has slowed as sustained interest in mini-notebooks helped to prop up business.

Some 16.7 million PC units were sold in the region during the quarter, which represented a decrease of 0.3 per cent, according to analyst firm Gartner.

But there was a sequential increase in sales over the second
quarter of a huge 30 per cent as large markets such as Germany and France returned to growth.

Although most territories saw relatively strong sales of consumer products and weak interest from the business segment, the speed at which the professional market will grow is likely to cary going forward, according to Ranjit Atwal, a principal analyst at Gartner. This means that some countries will see much faster growth than others.

The UK, for one however, is still experiencing a “very weak” business market and will continue to do so during the first half of 2010 as organisations continue to test and integrate Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system.

But the consumer market, on the other hand, “continued to defy the economic environment” due to the appeal of mini-notebooks, which provide “better functionality at the lower price points”, said Atwal.

“Most of the PC vendors now offer mini-notebooks as they realise the importance of this category. Mini-notebooks represented more than 40 per cent of the total consumer notebook market in the third quarter of 2009,” he added.

PC shipments in the UK totalled 3.3 million units during the quarter, a fall of 2.4 per cent compared with the same period in 2008 but a rise of 30 per cent on the second quarter.