The April index reading is almost 20% below the year-ago figure, and is 21% below the 12-month average.
Worse yet for the major PC makers — including Dell, (DELL) Hewlett-Packard, (HPQ) Apple (AAPL) and Gateway (GTW) — demand among some key customer groups has plummeted.
Planned PC purchases among parents sunk 32% in April from March. The purchase intent score for parents is at its lowest level since TechnoMetrica started measuring home PC purchase intent in April 2002.
Also hitting new lows for PC purchase intent were households with incomes over $75,000 and people with graduate or professional degrees. These groups are more likely to buy higher-end, feature-rich PCs, which carry higher prices and profits for PC makers, Kambanis says.
On a positive note, PC purchase intent among people 18 to 24 years old is at its highest level since the poll started five years ago.
IBD included this article so investors could get an idea of whether or not computer makers would be an attractive long of short. However, this information also gives us an idea of consumer sentiment going forward.
Retail sales are the only economic area holding the economy up. Because computers are a pricier item (with laptops still costing about $1000 per), consumer intent to purchase or not purchase these items gives us a clue for how confident consumers are going forward.
The drop in this number indicates consumers may not be that confident going forward. There could be a lot of non-income based reasons for this: Vista is unproven, it's too early to purchase for the fall semester etc... However, this number could also indicate consumers are either strapped financially or at least are pulling in their spending habits a bit.
4 comments:
Re: retail sales:
Here’s the Shoppertrak monthly Year-over-Year data beginning Thanksgiving 2006:
Monthly data: sales/foot traffic
Holiday season: +5.0%/-1.7%
January: +4.9%/-3.9%
February: +4.3%/-4.9%
March: +2.7%/+2.9%
The weekly data has to be treated as noise, there is too much variability in volume in this weighted index.
The months’ sales and traffic tell a more interesting story. First, notice how each successive month is increasing less over last year’s numbers. In the case of March, adjusted for inflation, there was no growth YoY.
Second, notice how the YoY sales increases have been built on less traffic. This is a pretty startling statistic, in that it suggests that the “median” consumer has rolled over, but the “mean”, more wealthy consumer has enough wealth to casue the overall result to stay positive. March’s positive foot traffic may be due to Easter coming one week earlier this year. By the end of April, we should know if the trend is intact.
If the trend continues, we should have negative YoY retail sales no later than summer.
(BTW, I haven't found Shoppertrak's earlier 2006 data anywhere online. I'd be glad to take the series back further, if someone can supply a source).
weird, Gartner says otherwise.
http://macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/13342/
The consumer is far from the only segment holding up the economy.
ISM services shows growth there.
Exports are up 10% from a year ago.
Business construction is also doing well, up double digits from a year ago.
And there is always government, which continues to spend regardless of the business cycle.
I just got a Mac mini - does that help?
Trying to do my part....
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