Desktops, however, recorded a 6.6% decline as Internet café demand dropped significantly in markets such as the Philippines due to a prolonged period of forced shutdown in business operation caused by the pandemic.
According to research firm IDC, the Philippines smartphone market grew annually by 26.8%, bringing in 4.2-million unit shipments in the first quarter of 2021.
Spending continued to consolidate in 2020 with the combined revenue of the top 5 public cloud service providers (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, Google, and Oracle) capturing 38% of the worldwide total and growing 32% year over year.
According to analyst firm ABI Research, the Covid-19 pandemic forced the worldwide shipments of e-passports to drop from 192 million in 2019 to 116 million in 2020.
While PCs remain in extremely high demand, the growth rate benefitted from the shortages faced in the first quarter of 2020 when the global pandemic began, resulting in an unusually favorable year-over-year comparison.