IQon under pressure in weak desktop PC market

The pressures faced by Irish PC manufacturers competing with international brands were underlined this week when an examiner was appointed to Dundalk's iQon Technologies.

As recently as March this year, iQon was ranked in the top 10 PC vendors in Ireland by analyst firm IDC, a position it had held since 2001. During the first quarter iQon shipped 8,500 PCs and had 4.5 per cent of the market.

This week the High Court heard the 18-year-old company, which employs 108 people, was insolvent with debts of over €7 million. Microsoft and Philips Electronics are among the biggest creditors.

In the late 1990s local brands such as Celtic Computers, PC Pro, Emcee and Romak (iQon's previous trading name) had small but significant shares of the PC market but most have since either pulled out of the market or have become niche players.

"The dominance of the international brands is very strong and getting stronger," says Eszter Morvay, a senior research analyst with IDC.

This week IDC released third-quarter data on the PC market in western Europe which showed that the top three brands - HP, Dell and Acer - account for 53 per cent of sales. In the same quarter last year they had 50 per cent.

The challenge for smaller manufacturers is that the notebook market has been growing faster than desktops - their traditional sweet spot. "The smaller vendors don't have the know-how to build notebooks so it is all outsourced to Taiwan," said Ms Morvay. "The equipment manufacturers there don't want to deal with smaller players."

The consumer desktop PC market has declined for six quarters in a row. "These vendors are also playing in the weakest segment of the market," she says. Indigenous brands in Britain have also been struggling and only southern European markets such as Greece, Portugal and Spain still have significant national players.

IQon seems to have adopted a strategy of trying to become a multinational itself. Earlier this year, it announced it had won export orders worth €15 million in Tunisia and Morocco only months after it said it had won a €10 million deal in France.

IQon piggy-backed on the brand of Dutch electronics multinational Philips producing a line of Multimedia by Philips PCs which were sold exclusively through Tesco stores. It is also understood to have had a contract to build specialist gaming PCs for Commodore Gaming, a company reviving the iconic 1980s computer brand.