US commercial channel sales fail to reach 2010 growth levels

January 26, 2012

The US commercial channel sales market, which includes resellers and distributors of computer and printer hardware, saw a 5.5 percent growth in sales in 2011, a fall from the growth of 13.5 percent in 2010.

According to the NPD Group of analysts, the market grew to a size of around $50 billion (€38.07 billion), which, whilst a positive growth, is less than half of that in 2010, when the sales market expanded by 13.5 percent, with the analyst noting that “sequential quarterly growth has been on the decline since the second quarter of 2010”.

The sales in 2011 featured 41 percent driven by devices, networking and hardware, with sales in these areas growing by “nearly double the rate” of the marketplace. Devices included notebooks, desktops and other computing machines, and this area grew 20 percent in unit sales and 14 percent in dollar sales.

Networking sales grew eight percent in dollars, whilst hardware sales grew by seven percent. Stephen baker, Vice President of Industry Analysis at NPD, stated: “Companies continued to spend on maintaining and enhancing their IT infrastructure in 2011, but sales growth has slowed for the last seven quarters indicating that the momentum for many categories may have hit a wall.

“Clearly there are still some major categories which continue to grow, but the 4 percent growth we saw in the fourth quarter of 2011 has fallen significantly from the nearly 21 percent growth we reached in Q2 2010 and is below 2011’s overall growth rate.”

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