Dubai: The PC market in the UAE is seeing a silver lining this year despite consumer sentiment and business activity being hampered by low crude oil prices, low tourist inflows and strong dollar.

“We are coming from a very low base in 2015 and compared to that, things are expected to get better. For the year, the market is expected to be flat (0.5 per cent) at 1.4 million units in 2016 compared to 1.39 million in 2015,” Fouad R. Charakla, a senior research manager at International Data Corporation (IDC), told Gulf News.

Moreover, the tablet market is also seeing a decline of 8.7 per cent to 1.63 million units compared to 1.78 million units in 2015.

He said that the emirates had the best quarter for the PC segment, in terms of volume, in the first quarter and the rest of the quarters are expected to perform slightly weaker.

In the first quarter, the PC market declined by 5.75 per cent to 359,680 units compared to 381,642 units during the same period last year.

He said that a rapid pace of decline over the past several quarters has caused the PC market size in the UAE to somewhat bottom-out for the time being, allowing it to attain some stability as it was seen experiencing the slowest decline among the other bigger markets in the Middle East and Africa during the first quarter of 2016.

In the recent past, IDC has also seen consolidation take place in the number of smaller tablet brands (local and low-cost Far Eastern) in the UAE.

He said that many of these brands were forced to exit the market due to lack of demand for their products or quality issues and excessive complaints from customers, which made it difficult for these brands to sustain their momentum.

Although Ramadan is not as impactful in UAE as in Saudi, however, he said that the summer season will witness several expatriates travelling abroad for vacation, negatively impacting spending in the country.

The ongoing shift in end-user spending toward smartphones and, to a lesser extent, tablets in the consumer segment was also a key element in the market’s decline, he added.

“We are expecting around a three per cent increase year on year in PC demand for the second quarter as the industry has almost bottomed out and expecting a gradual recovery,” Charakla said.

He said that UAE is expected to be the only country in the Gulf Cooperation Council to register an increase in shipments in the second quarter. The rest of the Gulf countries had big projects in 2015 which are very unlikely to be repeated this year.

The PC and the tablet markets are expected to recover to some extent next year.

In the first quarter, he said that the tablet market declined by 8.9 per cent and is expected to fall by 6.8 per cent in the second quarter as consumers are increasingly reluctant to replace their existing devices as several tasks that were previously performed by end users on tablets have now shifted to smartphones with larger screens.