E-Business
Tablets Killing Africa’s PC Market – IDC Report
The Middle East and Africa (MEA) PC market experienced a significant decline of 14.1 per cent year on year during the first quarter of 2013, according to preliminary results released weekend by International Data Corporation (IDC), the premier global market intelligence and advisory firm for the information technology and telecommunications markets.
The results says a total PC shipments in the MEA region slowed down to 5.3 million units, with desktops declining 18.4 per cent year on year to 2 million units, while notebook shipments declined 11.2 per cent year on year to total 3.3 million units.
Fouad Rafiq Charakla, research manager for PC, systems, and infrastructure solutions at IDC MEA and Turkey said: “With a growing portion of end users opting for tablets to meet their computing needs, the demand for PCs continues to suffer.
Looking at the more mature markets within the region, this trend is extremely visible within the power retail channel, where tablet sales have already exceeded portable PC sales in some power retail outlets.
Meanwhile, in markets where the purchasing power of end users is more restricted, low-cost tablets are cannibalizing the demand for locally assembled desktops.”
Microsoft’s recently launched operating system, Windows 8, which was primarily designed for a touch-enabled interface, has also been unable to spur incremental demand for PCs in the region. “Since adding the touch-screen interface hikes up the price of a PC by a considerable margin, the majority of PCs shipped presently still lack touch-enabled screens,” said Charakla.
“This has had the consequence of preventing the operating system from delivering to end users the user experience it is capable of, thus causing the demand for PCs to slow down.”
Growing competition from tablets has caused all key markets in the Middle East and Africa region to decline year on year, with the exception of Turkey, which attained marginal growth, driven by an aggressive sell-in push from certain vendors, power retail campaigns, and public sector initiatives.
“While the ‘Dubai Shopping Festival 2013’ and the ‘GITEX Shopper’ event of April 2013 positively impacted PC shipments in the UAE, these could not prevent the country’s PC market from experiencing a double-digit decline year on year,” said Charakla.
The shift towards demand for tablets was the key reason for the year-on-year declines in PC shipments seen in both Saudi Arabia and South Africa, while the worsening economic situation in the latter compounded the slowdown of its PC market. Two large PC deals were delivered into the education sectors of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan during the quarter, but these were unable to halt the regional decline.
Meanwhile, in Egypt, political instability continues to negatively affect the economy.
“The country is facing a major credit crisis,” said Victoria Mendes, a research analyst for personal computing, systems, and infrastructure solutions at IDC Middle East, Africa, and Turkey.
“The devaluation of the Egyptian pound resulted in PC prices increasing during the quarter, eventually causing sales and PC shipments into the country to slow down.”
The situation is similarly bleak elsewhere, according to Feras Ibrahim, a research analyst for personal computing, systems, and infrastructure solutions at IDC Middle East, Africa, and Turkey.
“All the smaller Gulf countries experienced a slowdown on PC shipments year on year due to tablet cannibalization and lack of foreign investments,” he said.
“Despite huge ongoing infrastructure-development projects in Qatar, PC shipments into the country declined year on year. Inventory liquidation efforts by market players in Oman prevented the country from accepting high shipments, while Kuwait and Bahrain suffered due to ongoing political and social unrest.”
Despite suffering a sharp year-on-year decline in PC shipments of 28.8 per cent, HP continued to dominate the Middle East and Africa PC market during the first quarter of 2013. Dell also experienced a slowdown in shipments, posting a decline of 12.3 per cent year on year, but it maintained its position at number two.
Lenovo was the only player among the top vendors to experience growth in the region during Q1 2013, growing 44.1 per cent year on year to place third.
A common trait among each of these top vendors is that all three enjoy a stronghold in both the commercial and consumer end-user segments.
Portable PC vendor Toshiba suffered a decline of 5.4per cent year on year, but was able to climb up to fourth position, while Taiwanese vendor Acer saw its PC shipments shrink by 25.5per cent over the same period as it slipped down to the fifth place. The key strengths of both these vendors continue to lie mainly within the consumer segment.
Transcorp Hotels Plc has delivered a stellar performance in the first half of 2025, recording a 60% year-on-year surge in revenue to ₦47.57 billion, up from ₦29.72 billion in H1 2024. Gross profit climbed 71% to ₦36.21 billion, maintaining a strong 76% margin despite inflation and operational headwinds.
The hospitality giant, a subsidiary of Transnational Corporation Plc, also announced an interim dividend payout of ₦1.024 billion — offering ₦0.10 per 50 kobo ordinary share to shareholders.
In a bold move, the company unveiled Nigeria’s largest corporate venue — the 5,000-seat Transcorp Centre — staking its claim as the new leader in event hospitality. Chairman Emmanuel Nnorom described the results as proof of Transcorp Hotels’ transformative strategies and unwavering investor commitment. MD/CEO Uzo Oshogwe attributed the success to relentless execution and a resilient business model.
Transcorp Hotels, renowned for iconic assets like Transcorp Hilton Abuja and its digital platform Aura, says it isn’t just leading Nigeria’s hospitality sector — it’s redefining excellence across Africa.
Chinese “threat actors” have hacked Microsoft’s SharePoint document software servers and targeted the data of the businesses using it, the firm has said.
China state-backed Linen Typhoon and Violet Typhoon as well as China-based Storm-2603 were said to have “exploited vulnerabilities” in on-premises SharePoint servers, the kind used by firms, but not in its cloud-based service.
The US tech giant has released security updates in response and has advised all on-premises SharePoint server customers to install them.
“Investigations into other actors also using these exploits are still ongoing,” Microsoft said in a statement.
The firm said it had “high confidence” the hackers would continue to target systems which have not installed its security updates.
It added that it would update its website blog with more information as its investigation continues.
Microsoft said it had observed attacks in which hackers had sent a request to a SharePoint server “enabling the theft of the key material by threat actors”.
Charles Carmakal, chief technology officer at Mandiant Consulting firm, a division of Google Cloud, told reporter, it was “aware of several victims in several different sectors across a number of global geographies”.
Carmakal said it appeared that governments and businesses that use SharePoint on their sites were the primary target.
A number of adversaries who stole material encoded by cryptography were then able to regain ongoing access to the victims’ SharePoint data, he said.
“This was exploited in a very broad way, very opportunistically before a patch was made available. That’s why this is significant,” Carmakal said.
Carmakal said the “China-nexus actor” was deploying techniques similar to previous campaigns associated with Beijing.
Microsoft said Linen Typhoon had “focused on stealing intellectual property, primarily targeting organizations related to government, defence, strategic planning, and human rights” for 13 years.
It added that Violet Typhoon had been “dedicated to espionage”, primarily targeting former government and military staff, non-governmental organizations, think tanks, higher education, the media, the financial sector and the health sector in the US, Europe, and East Asia.
Meanwhile, Storm-2603 was “assessed with medium confidence to be a China-based threat actor”.
National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) has issued a public warning that it is not associated with NINcard.com.
According to the commission, the website has been circulating online to offer services for Nigerians seeking National Identification Number (NIN) services.
NIMC, in a post on its official X account on Wednesday, said, “NINcard.com is not in anyway affiliated to NIMC. Stay vigilant!”
The warning was accompanied by screenshots of fake payment receipts and OTP request pages from the website, both of which were boldly stamped “FAKE” by NIMC to alert the public.
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