Tariff uncertainty hits US PC shipments in Q2

The impact of threatened tariffs from the Trump administration could cause shrinking PC sales, particularly in the US market, and potentially in other regions across the globe as well.

This prediction was featured in the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker, released Tuesday, which showed that, while global PC shipments during the second quarter of 2025 increased by 6.5% from the prior year, with 68.4 million units, the US market is starting to feel the pinch of import tariffs.

Jean Phillippe Bouchard, IDC’s research vice president of data and analytics, said, “what we are witnessing here might highlight US PC demand slowing down in anticipation of the import tariffs looming deadline.”

In an email to Computerworld, he added, “as we’ve seen with the latest quarterly results, the US market remained flat, while the rest of the world grew at 9% year over year. As PC vendors are looking for ways to mitigate the impact of tariffs on pricing, the supply chain is bound to be impacted.”

On Wednesday, Canalys reported similar results for the quarter, estimating that while worldwide shipments of desktops, notebooks, and workstations grew 7.4% to 67.6 million units, “the Trump’s administration’s ever-changing and unclear approach to tariffs continues to generate considerable uncertainty. While PCs were exempt from tariffs in Q2, indirect impacts threaten not only the US, but the global market recovery.”

*No pending crisis*

Greg Davis, lead US analyst on the Canalys team that put the findings together, said Thursday, “at this point in time, we do not predict that a pending crisis might exist, at least not one that is specific to the PC industry. While, as we have mentioned, there is still quite a bit of uncertainty surrounding the US and its global economic trade policies, many of the larger PC vendors have taken steps to help diversify their supply chains to better navigate what evolving scenarios may occur in the near-term.”

He said, despite that, “what may have a larger impact on the anticipated growth of the PC market this year, and next, is the rising cost of goods for everything else. When you look at consumer purchasing behaviors, expensive electronic devices like PCs are not as high a priority as things like food and energy.”

When overall purchasing power is impacted by rising costs, said Davis, “the PC market will face a downward pressure even if the industry itself is not directly affected by economic changes.”

*Tariff situation a ‘moving target’*

Scott Bickley, advisory fellow at Info-Tech Research Group, said, “the US market has already moved to accelerate PC purchases in Q1 of this year in anticipation of tariffs being enacted in July. Buyers who have not been proactive should prepare now while the tariff exemption window is still open.”

The tariff situation, he said, “is a moving target and changes daily in terms of the impacted countries, product classes affected, and level of tariff to be levied. PC buyers are sandwiched between the Windows 10 end of life date looming large, normal PC refresh cycles, and the prospect of some level of tariff to be a likely outcome at some point in the future. Some PC vendors are already trying to apply a tariff price increase to new PC sales; buyers should push back on this tactic.”

Mark Moccia, VP research director with Forrester Research, added that if PC shipments, which are currently exempt, do become impacted by tariffs, there’s the potential for ballooning costs for enterprises that are in the midst of an entire fleet device refresh as part of a migration, or just a modest increase in costs for business as usual device refreshes.

The downstream impact of this, he pointed out, “is either the CIO has less money to spend on transformational efforts [such as] AI, or the CEO has to allocate more money from the company P&L toward tech to keep both the run and transformational expenses going.”

And supply chain complexity “provides additional uncertainty in terms of the cost of PCs due to where raw materials are sourced, where chips are produced, and where assembly occurs. The uncertainty with PC costs is especially problematic with the loss of Windows 10 support (and potential mass upgrades) occurring this year,” he said.

*A complicated story*

Anshel Sag, principal analyst at Moor Insight & Strategy, described the current situation as a “complicated story, because I do believe tariffs are a major issue. Some of the inflationary pressures of tariffs on OEMs are forcing them to keep prices higher, which is affecting their ability to offer deals, and that’s affecting volumes.”

Additionally,  he said, “we are likely already in a recession, which would make both consumers and businesses more sensitive to PC prices. By all measures, this was supposed to be an up year for the PC industry because of AI PCs, Copilot+, and Windows 10, but with so much uncertainty, including tariffs, things are not looking as rosy.”

With tariffs, Bickley pointed out, “the devil is in the details, and those details are not yet finalized. This means any supply chain pre-positioning by the PC manufacturers may be premature. It is safe to say that for PCs manufactured in Mexico vs Southeast Asia, the tariff impact would likely be lower due to the favorable provisions in the USMCA [United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement].”

He added, “aside from the obvious tactic of pre-buying to build stock, I expect organizations to start buying down-the-stack as a means to offset a tariff-based price increase. While suppliers will absorb some of the tariff impact, their supply chains and internal processes are already quite mature, meaning most of the impact may be passed onto the customer.” 

This, said Bickley, mean organizations must become more mindful of the minimum performance level of the hardware required for various job roles.