Recycling critical raw materials from waste electronic equipment

32
Recycling critical raw materials from waste electronic
equipment
market share had already risen to 14% (see Figure 15). In comparison, the German market
share for traditional desktop PCs was only 28.5%, with 50.4% for notebooks and 7.1% for
netbooks. Considering only the traditional PC business, notebooks and netbooks together
account for around two thirds (Heise 2011, in agreement with Gartner 2011a).
Figure 15: Percentages of different types of computer on the German market, 2nd quarter, 2011 (from
Heise 2011)
According to Young (2011), tablet PCs are likely to have a market share of up to 30% in
2013 (see Figure 16). The market for netbooks, however, which still accounted for approx.
17% of sales worldwide in 2010, already appears to be heading for saturation. It is
anticipated that the market share will fall to only around 5% by 2013 (Young 2011). This
development also reflects the decision by many private consumers who increasingly choose
to purchase a tablet PC rather than a notebook. In Germany, sales of computers in the
private sector (minus tablet PCs) in the third quarter of 2011 dropped by 17% compared to
the previous year. The notebook sector suffered an even larger decline whilst sales of
desktop PCs remained somewhat more stable (Gartner 2011b). Gartner does not predict any
recovery of the market for the remainder of 2011. Due to ongoing floods in Thailand,
bottlenecks in the supply of hard disk drives and other electronic components could lead to
price increases for all types of computers and, as a consequence, to a continuing fall in
demand and sales.
23 incl. VAT