HAVING endured difficult trading conditions for the first half of last financial year, Perth’s Apple-Macintosh computer vendors report they have turned the corner in recent months.
HAVING endured difficult trading conditions for the first half of last financial year, Perth’s Apple-Macintosh computer vendors report they have turned the corner in recent months.
Like many businesses, computer retailers were battered by poor consumer sentiment after September last year.
Martin Healey, the manager of Desktop Applications, said that in the period from July to December 2001, his business’s sales of computer goods halved, on a year-on-year basis. Both hardware and software sales were part of the downturn in trade, which in part was seasonal, but which was also worsened by September’s terrorist attacks in the US.
Mr Healey described that six-month period as “dire”, and said it was probably the worst six months of trading the business had experienced. But the past six months have been markedly better, with goods sales 30 per cent higher in the second half of the 2001-02 financial year than in the first half.
“It’s not brilliant – it’s still a bit below – but it’s starting to return to previous levels,” Mr Healey said.
This assessment of trading conditions was supported by manager of Generation Mac, Barry Jones.
Mr Jones said hardware sales at his business were trending upwards, and the newer model computers, in particular, were selling well. He said there had been a drop in the purchasing of high-end computers, except among Perth’s larger companies, but new lower-end products were appealing to people who wanted to upgrade their systems.
“I see a lot of people coming from a PC environment coming to the Mac environment, mainly because of the fact that they are not disappointed with the Windows environment; the people themselves are just not as compatible as they’d like to be with a Windows environment,” Mr Jones said.
It seems the switch to Macintosh is not limited to end-users either.
Mr Healey said a job advertisement he placed recently attracted a wealth of applications from PC technicians, when the usual response would number only a dozen or so.
“Normally when I advertise for a technician I would get a CV from the same old Apple technicians in the marketplace,” Mr Healey said.
“This time I just had about 153 replies, from PC technicians who actually didn’t mind working for Apple.
“While there are a lot of out-of-work PC consultants I also think they’re seeing that the Mac operating system is now Unix-based and they’re quite excited by that.”
