By Anhar Khanbhai

Education sales led to a 6% growth in the struggling Australian PC market with 6.8 million units sold according to a new report by IDC.

However, IDC said in the report released today that the end of the education roll out would bring about negative PC sales growth in the next 12 months with a fall in the market evident in Q4 across all ANZ PC segments except the education sector.

In the last quarter, 1.55 million units were shipped in Australia representing 10% year-on-year growth and 2% sequential growth primarily due to major rollouts to schools as part of the Digital Education Revolution.

"Apple seized the top position as number one consumer brand in Q4 for the first time in Australia," IDC market analyst, Amy Cheah told The Australian.

"However, the vendor lost its second spot in the overall ANZ notebook market as Acer saw strong uplift in Q4 on the back of a major deal with Queensland schools.”

HP still maintained its lead in the total PC market for the full year despite losing share in Q4, IDC said.

The research company found that, outside of the education sector, commercial uptake was sluggish across Australia and New Zealand.

The hard disk drive) shortage resulting from severe flooding in Thailand further caused industry-wide tightening in supply.

However, the negative impact was milder than initially feared as larger vendors in the Australia New Zealand region were given priority in securing HDD supply over other countries as a result of the higher value ANZ market, IDC found.

Christmas season spending on IT was sporadic, picking up only towards the end of December.

With education PC roll outs decelerating, IDC said it expected the Australian PC market to contract 2% in the full year of 2012.