Count Bruce Stephen, vice president of PC market research at Framingham, Mass.-based research firm International Data Corp., among them. Stephen says the third quarter is traditionally slow for European PC sales, while the fourth quarter often makes up for the difference. Europe tends to have the biggest spike of any region worldwide during the fourth quarter. Their market tends to go to sleep during the third quarter. A lot of business and consumer buying shuts down.
People take time off.
If Stephen is right, that means there may yet be some good news from PC makers like Dell and Compaq coming out of Europe before the year is out. Overall, IDC remains bullish on worldwide PC sales for the third quarter. And we still think the overall growth picture for PC sales looks healthy. Fill in this form for your free trial issue. U.S. indexes are real-time.