“Growth in the mature markets was offset by a decline in shipments in emerging markets, similar to what was seen in the second quarter of 2014,” said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner.

“Positive results in Western Europe and North America can be a sign of gradual recovery for the PC industry.

“Consumers’ attention is slowly going back to PC purchases as tablet adoption peaked with mainstream consumers. The transition from PCs to tablets has faded as tablet penetration has reached the 40-50 percent range,” Mikako added.

In contrast, weakness in the emerging market reflects the saturation in selected consumer segments where they can afford PCs. In the meantime, consumers who don’t have PCs will likely buy low priced tablet. This is a one of the major reasons for the slow growth in PC shipments in the emerging market.”

For the first time, the sum of the top five vendors' share reached two-thirds of the worldwide PC shipments. All top 5 vendors showed stronger growth compared to the industry average. Scale is one important success criteria for vendors to survive in the PC market. Some vendors have already scaled back or have withdrawn from the PC business — namely, Sony and Samsung — and Toshiba joined them in 3Q14.

Lenovo extended its position as the worldwide leader in PC shipments, as it accounted for 19.8 percent of the market in the third quarter of 2014. Lenovo did especially well in EMEA as it achieved more than 40 percent growth over the third quarter last year. It also had year-over-year growth in Asia/Pacific, despite the region showing a decline overall.

In Asia/Pacific, PC shipments surpassed 26.2 million units in the third quarter of 2014, a 5.3 percent decline from the third quarter of 2013. The market remained challenging, especially in China where the PC purchasing appetite has slowed due to more pragmatic consumer and government IT spending. Business desk-based PC demand has been steady, suggesting a continuing replacement cycle due to the end of Windows XP support.