PC vendors need to get their story straight
Are you suffering from memory loss? Maybe not yet, but one thing we can say with certainty is that we’ll all suffer from it, eventually, even if we might not be able to predict when with any great certainty because it varies by individual.
The bad news is that the PC industry looks like it’s on course to suffer a collective memory loss in the second half of next year. Okay, so we could quibble over whether a memory shortage is exactly the same as loss, but for the purposes of this article, we’ll assume it is.
Lenovo, HP and Dell have all warned of looming memory shortages next year. They all claim they are best-placed to mitigate those shortages but they can’t all be right, can they?
On 19 November, Lenovo chairman and CEO, Yang Yuanqing told analysts: “This is not new for our industry, supply shortage or supply cost up and down [is] the normal situation for the industry. But I believe Lenovo is better positioned and more flexible and resilient than our peers to manage it effectively”, adding “we have the best supply chain in our industry”.
He claimed the company was “very confident we can continue to drive double-digit growth in both our PC business as well as our server and infrastructure solution business” over the next two quarters.
Six days later, HP CEO Enrique Lores told CRN that it expected to see higher price increases in 2026 and was starting to take actions to mitigate them “so we can over-deliver versus the plans that we have shared today”.
Not to be outdone, Dell Technologies chief operating officer Jeff Clarke chimed in a day later on 26 November, telling investors that the company was “going to do everything we can to minimise the impact, but the fact is, the cost basis is going up across all products”, but said Dell would “do everything we can to mitigate that”.
Clarke also stressed Dell had a lot of experience with memory shortages, highlighting this wasn’t the company’s “first DRAM cycle. There have been seven, I think, in the last 40 years”. Weirdly enough, he went on to state “we’re in a very unique time. It’s unprecedented. We have not seen costs move at the rate that we’ve seen”. If this appeared slightly contradictory, he added that the last cycle “of this magnitude” was in 2016 and 2017.
So the good news is the PC industry, vendors, distributors and partners, has built up a lot of experience in navigating component shortages of one type of another over the course of its nearly 50-year lifecycle. The slightly less encouraging news is that it hasn’t always done a great job of it.
There are also mixed messages over the effect of Windows 11 adoption. Clarke at Dell said “if you were to look at it relative to the previous OS end of support, we are 10-12 points behind at that point with Windows 11 than we were the previous generation” but Lores at HP claimed that “momentum in the Windows 11 refresh and AI PC adoption drove commercial growth year over year, both of which we expect to continue into fiscal year 2026.”
The good news is all seem agreed that partners have an important role to play in managing customer expectations and mitigating shortages. The slightly less good news for partners is that unless the messaging on supply from vendors is clear and honest, they can frequently bear the brunt of frustration and disappointment from customers.
After all these years and cycles, vendors should have learned from the past and be able to remember what needs to be done to mitigate the worst effects of the shortages next year. Let’s hope that memory hasn’t been lost.
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