Device as a Service (DaaS) Market Research Report - Global Forecast till 2030

Impact of COVID-19 on the Device as a Service Market

The COVID-19 outbreak has caused an unprecedented global emergency, which has negatively impacted businesses across various industry verticals. Governments are making interventions in response to the spread of coronavirus. The impact has been felt by large enterprises as well as SMEs around the world. In order to keep the employees safe and adhere to the stringent guidelines laid by the governments, enterprises have adopted the work from home policy, which is creating a significant demand for the device as a service market during the pandemic.

During the pre-COVID-19 phase, the device as a service was majorly in demand from large enterprises. However, in March 2020, with sudden implementation of the lockdown, there has been a rapid growth in the device as a service market. With an increasing number of companies looking at work from home options amidst the COVID-19 outbreak, there has been a sudden spike in demand for laptops and other IT hardware devices. The device as a service market has witnessed an increasing demand during the pandemic phase to manage hardware devices are such as personal computers (PCs), laptops, desktops, tablets or mobile phones, and the software that is required to operate in the enterprises so that they are readily available for remote working environments. DaaS has also been witnessing demand from SMEs as it provides all the related services under a single contract to a customer with monthly subscription fees, thereby helping enterprises to minimize their IT expenses, particularly for IT hardware infrastructure. Outsourcing the management and monitoring of the hardware devices and related services to third parties enables smooth IT infrastructure operational processes. It enhances the overall working experience of the employees so that the management can focus on developing strategies to boost sales and profitability. Furthermore, the DaaS model also offers skilled technical expertise and analytics, which help in unified endpoint management, mitigating security risks, reducing downtime, and also provide analytics, which boosts productivity and optimizes the uptime of the IT devices. Amongst all the IT hardware devices, Laptops saw a significant demand during the COVID-19 lockdown phase.

However, the demand from companies to procure laptops and other IT hardware was so sudden that there is a shortage in the market due to supply issues. The majority of the producers of IT hardware devices are based in China, and most factories were based in Wuhan. Though China is the largest supplier of PCs and Laptops across the globe, the supply chains in China have been severely impacted due to Wuhan being the point of emergence for the COVID-19 pandemic. Currently, the supply of IT devices is unable to match the demand in time, which is posing a challenge to the exponential market growth. During Q1 2020, the demand for PCs witnessed a decline of about 12% in shipments. However, as the pandemic spread across the globe by the second half of March, most of the countries enforced partial or full lockdown, suspending all non-essential activities and halting business operations. A sudden spike in demand for PCs was observed to meet the need for remote working environments and online learning that the PC manufacturers could not keep up with. However, MRFR expects that this demand will exist only for a short period of time during the COVID-19 lockdown phase, post that the demand for PCs is expected to decline gradually. Thus, the COVID-19 pandemic is expected to have an overall positive impact on the device as a service market.