SAN FRAN­CIS­CO-US per­son­al com­put­er sales sagged dur­ing the spring as shift­ing tech­nol­o­gy trends, up­com­ing prod­uct re­leas­es and a shaky econ­o­my damp­ened de­mand for the ma­chines cur­rent­ly on the mar­ket. The sec­ond-quar­ter de­cline in the US ranged from 6 per cent to 11 per cent com­pared with the same time last year, ac­cord­ing to sep­a­rate re­ports re­leased yes­ter­day by Gart­ner Inc. and In­ter­na­tion­al Da­ta Corp. Gart­ner came up with the low­er of the two fig­ures in the re­search firms' quar­ter­ly look at ship­ments of desk­top and lap­top com­put­ers.

World­wide PC ship­ments held up bet­ter dur­ing the quar­ter, dip­ping by just 0.1 per cent from last year. This marks the sev­enth con­sec­u­tive quar­ter in which glob­al PC ship­ments have ei­ther de­creased or edged up on­ly slight­ly from the pre­vi­ous year, ac­cord­ing to Gart­ner's cal­cu­la­tions.

Hewlett-Packard Co. and Dell Inc., the biggest PC mak­ers in the US mar­ket, suf­fered the steep­est drops dur­ing the three months span­ning from April through June. HP's sec­ond-quar­ter ship­ments in the US fell by 12 per cent or 13 per cent, ac­cord­ing to the re­ports, while Dell's sales in the coun­try de­creased by about 9 per­cent.

The slump rep­re­sents an­oth­er set­back for HP, a Sil­i­con Val­ley pi­o­neer that has been strug­gling to boost its prof­its dur­ing the past two years. At one point last year, HP con­sid­ered sell­ing or spin­ning off its PC busi­ness, but that idea was aban­doned af­ter the com­pa­ny hired Meg Whit­man as its CEO near­ly 10 months ago. Since her ar­rival, Whit­man has drawn up plans to elim­i­nate 27,000 jobs dur­ing the next three years to save up to US$3.5 bil­lion an­nu­al­ly.

Dell al­so is plan­ning to trim more than US$2 bil­lion from its an­nu­al ex­pens­es as it ad­justs to the up­heaval in the PC mar­ket. Con­sumers and busi­ness­es have been buy­ing few­er PCs dur­ing the past two years amid the grow­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty of smart­phones and tablet com­put­ers such as Ap­ple Inc's iPad. The iPad's suc­cess has spurred Ap­ple's ri­vals to copy the con­cept, caus­ing some an­a­lysts to pre­dict that tablet com­put­er sales will sur­pass PC sales with­in the next few years.

PC mak­ers have tried to adapt by re­leas­ing sleek­er lap­tops known as "ul­tra­books," but IDC said many of those de­vices re­main too ex­pen­sive for many house­holds at time of high un­em­ploy­ment and per­sis­tent fears of an­oth­er eco­nom­ic down­turn.