ITResearch Analysis of the Russian IT market

2016 Russian monitor market closed “net positive”
Upon a special request of IT-Bestsellers editors, ITResearch analysis company presented preliminary data on the Russian monitor market for Q4 2016 and the entire 2016. Q4 monitors sales were estimated at 762,000 pieces. This is a solid up 6.3% to the previous year’s figure, which is quite good, although the growth was lower than in the previous quarters.
One would prefer not to say that the market growth has already flattened but we may well expect a certain pause to set in. In total about 2.33 mln. monitors were sold in 2016. All in all, the growth to 2015 was 10.6%. This figure looks impressive and is considerably higher than the expectations voiced in the beginning of 2016, as oil prices and ruble exchange rate were dropping sharply.

Weak Laptop Market in December
According to ITResearch, the Russian laptop market saw relatively low sales in December, 2016: 373,000 devices were sold. On the one hand, this was the peak figure for the year but, on the other, it is just slightly higher than the figures of the other “strong” months. The annual trend dropped sharply in December, whereas October and November values were still positive.
A significant strengthening of ruble exchange rate had obviously brought the market down – the consumers chose to wait with purchasing expensive goods. Moreover, retail prices for most of the product range did not change significantly: they decreased by 1% on the average while ruble exchange rate strengthened by 6% and even more in December. Sales of the mass-market “low-cost” laptops were low, whereas the more expensive solutions – both ultra-portable and multimedia & gaming devices – increased their share considerably.
As a result, the peak season market saw an absolutely untypical dramatic increase of the weighted average laptop price caused by changes of the price segment shares.
Lenovo did retain its leadership; Acer, Asus, Dell and HP (in the alphabetical order) came in the top five as well. Taken together, these companies hold 91% of the market.

December 2016 Monitor Market Shrank
According to ITResearch, December 2016 monitor sales in Russia are estimated at 273,000 pieces worth approximately 45 mln. USD. This was a 6% down to the previous year’s figure; experts had not expected such a significant decrease.
This decrease broke the upward trend observed in 2016. The analysts tend to attribute this December drop to the growth of ruble exchange rate caused by rising oil prices. Usually the customers tend to hold their rubles at such seasons and to wait with purchasing any non-critical equipment, including desktop PCs and monitors.
In December, Acer retained the leadership it won as of the end of November. Although the analysts had expected high sales at federal retail chains, their shop floor performance turned out not so optimistic. As a result, Samsung failed to regain the top position and came number two. Next came Philips, and then AOC, Benq and Dell with narrow gaps in between. The leading group remains very close.

Monitors Becoming Steadily Cheaper…
According to ITResearch monitor retail price analysis, the average price of a monitor steadily decreased from mid-November to the end of December 2016. In absolute terms the price erosion over this period was about 1,000 RUR.
It is evident that this trend was caused by a systematic strengthening of ruble/dollar exchange rate. In this case, products offered by almost all vendors were affected, since most of them depend heavily on the current dollar exchange rate (probably this does not fully apply to LG and Samsung who run final assembling lines in the RF).
This trend has continued after the new-year-season rebound but the average level is still 500 RUR higher than the 2016 year-end “bottom”.

Chart of Weekly Average Monitor Price (RUR)
Source: ITResearch, raw data provided by Yandex.Market
*The calculations are made by ITResearch based on offer prices published by Yandex.Market. On the one hand, over 8,500 monitor models are included in the Russian market database; on the other, significantly fewer models (1,200 at most) are actually sold (and have price tags), and their number has been rather stable.