Asia/Pacific and the U.S. experienced declining shipments, while other regions saw some minimal growth, but it was not enough to drive overall growth for the PC industry. In the first quarter of 2018, PC shipments in Asia/Pacific declined 3.9 percent compared with the same period last year, while shipments in the U.S. decreased 2.9 percent.

"The major contributor to the decline came from China, where unit shipments declined 5.7 percent year over year," said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner. "This was driven by China's business market, where some state-owned and large enterprises postponed new purchases or upgrades, awaiting new policies and officials' reassignments after the session of the National People's Congress in early March.

"In the first quarter of 2018, there was some inventory carryover from the fourth quarter of 2017," Ms. Kitagawa said. "At the same time, vendors were cautious in overstocking due to the upcoming release of new models in the second quarter of 2018 with Intel's new eighth-generation core processors."

The top three vendors — HP, Lenovo and Dell — accounted for 56.9 percent of global PC shipments in the first quarter of 2018, compared with 54.5 percent of shipments in the first quarter of 2017. Dell experienced the strongest growth rate among the top six vendors worldwide, as its shipments increased 6.5 percent.