Omdia: China's PC market growth softened in Q3 2025 as consumer subsidy effects diminished

New data from Omdia has revealed that China's PC market grew 2% year-over-year (YoY) to 11.3 million units in Q3 2025. Desktop shipments (including desktop workstations) reached 3.3 million units, an 8% increase driven by strong demand from the commercial segment, which saw shipments up 9%. Notebook shipments (including mobile workstations) remained flat at 8.0 million units, as the impact of consumer subsidies weakened during the quarter. The tablet market continued its strong momentum, with shipments increasing 9% YoY to 8.8 million units.

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Mainland China desktop and notebook shipments, Q1 2024 - Q4 2026

Looking ahead, China's PC market is expected to grow 5% YoY by the end of 2025, reaching 41.5 million units. Growth will be supported by resilient consumer demand in the first half of the year and robust commercial procurement, particularly from the XinChuang sector. This trend is expected to continue into 2026, with the market forecasted to decline slightly by 2% amid further softening of consumer demand. The tablet market is projected to grow 12% to 35 million units by the end of 2025, fueled by aggressive product launches and pricing strategies from domestic vendors before experiencing a corrective decline of 9% to 32 million units in 2026.

"The subsidies introduced at the end of August 2024 boosted shipments in the second half of that year, but both the scope and impact of the incentives have weakened in Q3 2025," said Emma Xu, Senior Analyst at Omdia. "However, there has been further continued healthy levels of commercial PC procurement from large state-owned enterprises and the government in the last two quarters. As domestic replacement within the XinChuang ecosystem accelerates, we expect procurement favoring locally sourced PC components to become an increasingly important growth driver in the coming year, especially as consumer subsidies fade."

Unlike PCs, tablets continue to show strong momentum in 2025. "Ongoing discounting and direct post-subsidy pricing mean tablets remain a highly attractive purchase for Chinese consumers," said Xu. "Vendors such as Huawei, Xiaomi and Lenovo are expanding more diversified product portfolios tailored to a range of use cases - from basic everyday tasks to gaming and productivity. Moreover, top tier vendors like Huawei are pushing deeper ecosystem integration and unified AI back-end capabilities, which provide a more compelling value proposition for productivity-focused users. AI features, including on-device AI assistants and applications along with cross-device interoperability will continue to strengthen market appeal."

Overall, AI adoption is becoming more widespread across both consumer and commercial segments in Mainland China. CPU performance, storage capacity, and NPU blocks remain the key hardware considerations for buyers planning AI-related use cases, including XinChuang opportunities. Omdia expects that the 32% of PCs shipped to Greater China in 2025 and 46% in 2026 will be AI-capable.

ABOUT OMDIA

Omdia, part of Informa TechTarget, Inc. (NASDAQ:TTGT), is a technology research and advisory group. Our deep knowledge of tech markets grounded in real conversations with industry leaders and hundreds of thousands of data points, make our market intelligence our clients' strategic advantage. From R&D to ROI, we identify the greatest opportunities and move the industry forward.

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