Europe, 15th June 2016 – The result of more than 10,000 detailed responses from hardware enthusiasts across the continent, in 9 languages, the European Hardware Association (EHA) has today made the results of its Pan-European Hardware Purchasing Survey Q2 2016 available.

The summary results were presented to an audience of almost 200 market leaders and innovators at the start of Computex 2016 at the Taipei International Convention Centre in Taiwan.

Today the full, detailed results are being made available to the industry as a whole.

Key results include:

  • While up to 86% of enthusiasts are now booting from an SSD on their main system,
  • that figure drops to just 36% in the workplace – highlighting a significant potential growth market for solid state drive vendors
  • AMD’s has a big opportunity with Zen/Summit Ridge as only 10% of those surveyed presently use any kind of AMD processor in their main system
  • There is plenty of growth opportunity for the gaming market in Italy, with only 66% of enthusiasts saying that gaming was their number one use for a home PC
  • The upgrade market and opportunities to sell new PCs with next-gen hardware are also enormous, with only 12% of European enthusiasts presently on Intel’s latest CPU/platform
  • Almost 40% of those surveyed will be looking for a new monitor – with high resolution/frequency products creating interest

It is the largest survey of its kind and only made possible through close collaboration from the European Hardware Association member states, including SweClockers  from Sweden, Hardware.info from the Netherlands, HardwareLuxx from Germany, CowCotLand from France, Hardware Upgrade from Italy, HispaZone from Spain, PurePC from Poland, Lab501 from Romania and KitGuru from the UK.

The combined readership of these publications is just over 22 million and, together, they have published well over 100,000 expert technology articles.

Andrzej Bania from EHA Founder Member KitGuru in the UK said, “With so many new technologies being launch this year, and the upcoming replacement cycles on Windows 8 and 8.1 to follow, the massive revenue opportunities for the hardware industry in 2017/18 are clear. The new launches from nVidia, AMD and Intel have completely energised the market”.

Dennis Bode from EHA Founder Member HardwareLuxx in Germany said,“Comparing the summary data with the detailed results from each region, reveals some very interesting differences. Companies that are unaware of these differences will struggle to maximise their sales potential within any of these markets”.  “A key area of focus in this report was a detailed analysis of current platform penetration, which has massive implications in terms of upgrade path and revenue potential”, said Bode.

Koen Crijns from EHA founder member Hardware Info in The Netherlands said, “Maturity in a market clearly does not equal a reduction in interest. Despite a significant increase in the sale of solid state drives over the past 12 months, this report clearly shows that the potential for PCI Express and NVMe memory devices is still massive”. “On-going research by the European Hardware Association shows that this group of publications influences more than €22 billion in technology spending each year. This report gives vendors and manufacturers a much better idea of where that spend will be focused – allowing them to focus their marketing resources in a more precise way”, said Crijns.

This detailed report throws up some interesting statistics on the differences between individual markets and it’s an essential read for anyone involved in sales, marketing or management roles within a technology-led organisation.