Spending on devices will rise two per cent to $600bn in 2017 - Gartner

Higher component costs combined with users opting for quality over price will see average selling prices for devices go up

Spending on PCs, ultramobiles and mobiles will increase by two per cent in 2017 to $600bn, according to analyst group Gartner.

It believes that average selling prices for computing devices will go up because of a combination of component price increases and because users increasingly value higher quality over low prices.

Spending on smartphones represents 67 per cent of the $600bn figure, according to Gartner, with end-user spending on mobiles on track to reach nearly $400bn in 2017 - an increase of 4.3 per cent from 2016.

"[End users] are replacing their basic phones with better-quality and more feature-rich basic phones, due to improved product portfolios from rising vendors, such as Huawei and Oppo," said Annette Zimmermann, research vice president at Gartner.

She continued: "In emerging markets, the majority of users are upgrading to better basic phones as the leap to premium phones remains out of reach for most."

Gartner also believes that the high-end smartphone average selling price will continue to rise, following the announcement of the Samsung Galaxy 8 and the release of the tenth-anniversary Apple iPhone.

"We expect the premium-phone average selling price to increase by four per cent in North America in 2017," said Zimmerman.

Meanwhile, sales of PCs, notebooks and desktops remain flat with total units shipped this year expected to be 205 million, a decrease of 15 million from last year.

The average-selling prices of those devices will increase by 1.4 per cent in 2017 because of increasing component costs, particularly for DRAM.

"As a result, PC providers will increase the prices of PCs toward the end of the year. We expect the overall ASP for PCs to increase by 1.4 percent in current U.S. dollars," said Ranjit Atwal, research director at Gartner.

Gartner expects premium ultramobile devices, which include Intel x86 products running Windows 10 and the Apple MacBook Air, to ship 10 million more units in 2017 than 2016 - increasing from 50 million to 60 million.

However, other devices in the ultramobile category, such as the Apple iPad, iPad mini, Samsung Galaxy Tab S2, Amazon Fire HD, Lenovo Yoga Tab 3 and Acer Iconia One, are expected to see a decrease in shipments of eight million: from 169 million in 2016 to 161 million in 2017.

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