Sales of laptops continued to displace those of desktop PCs across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) during the second quarter of 2006, according to new figures from research firm IDC. Overall growth in sales slowed because of the World Cup affecting consumer sales, but also because a slackening of corporate refresh activity, IDC said.

Total PC shipments across EMEA reached 15.4 million units during the second quarter, a growth of 6.4 percent on the same period of 2005. However, growth was as low as 0.7 percent in Western Europe, with desktop sales here showing an 11 percent decline.

"Two factors contributed to lower overall growth. The World Cup diverted consumer attention to LCD screens, while some level of excess inventory across channels put additional price pressure on vendors," said Karine Paoli, research director for EMEA personal computing at IDC.

HP retained overall PC market leadership across EMEA, and also in desktop sales, while Acer was the top selling vendor in the laptop market.

Laptop sales grew strongly, especially in the value £399 to £499 price points, IDC said. This is a trend the company sees continuing in the future, but with laptop sales standing at 6 million to 9 million desktops, there is still some way to go before they dominate the PC market.

IDC's Andy Brown said that there was increasing pressure on laptop vendors to speed new models to market and so introduce features such as wide area networking (WAN). This is resulting in shorter refresh cycles for laptops, according to IDC.

"There is permanent upgrade activity with laptops," agreed Paoli. In contrast, there will probably be a lull in desktop sales over the next three or four quarters because corporate customers in Europe are not yet ready for a big refresh and will wait until after Windows Vista ships.

"Even if Vista was available now, companies won’t pick it up before the end of 2007 or 2008," Paoli said.