Laptop sales still strong in Canada, IDC says

IDC's latest research on the state of the PC market in Canada reveals that notebook and desktop sales remain strong for the North American nation, ITBusiness Canada reports.

"It was a much better [fourth] quarter certainly than we forecast, which is a good surprise,” Tim Brunt, a senior analyst for personal computing at IDC Canada, says, according to the news provider.

To close out 2011, IDC's research shows, overall PC shipments grew 0.86 percent compared to 2010. That is good enough to set a new all-time high in terms of PC shipments in Canada.

Notebooks and netbooks, which IDC classifies as portable PCs, finished 2011 with 1.2 million units shipped in the fourth quarter -- good for a growth of 7.8 percent compared to the same time period of the previous year.

Overall, this year is expected to be more successful for PC shipments globally than 2011, research firm Gartner says. It predicts that sales will top 404 million units in 2012 compared to the 364 million units that were estimated to ship last year. This would constitute a growth of 10.9 percent in 2012.