Pc Sales Helped Brighten Dismal Holiday Season Late Buying Surge Salvaged Season For Computer Companies

Brian Tjader of Los Altos, Calif., represents, in many ways, why the holiday season was a lot merrier for computer companies than the rest of the retail world.

Tjader spent about six months looking for a personal computer. The prices for the things he wanted - a 100-megahertz Pentium microprocessor with eight megabytes of memory, a good video graphics card and the Windows 95 operating system - kept coming down.

Pretty soon, IBM was packaging everything he wanted in an Aptiva multimedia computer. So Tjader dished out $2,000 and his kids heralded its arrival one day last month. His 4-year-old son, Brett, plays the games all the time.

“I can’t get him off it,” Tjader said.

Consumers like the Tjaders kept PC retailers and mail-order companies in a frenzy of business in December. Analysts are awaiting final data about holiday returns, but the initial reports suggest that computer sales were better than other retail sectors.

ARS Inc., a market research firm in Irving, Texas, reported last Thursday that its post-Christmas survey of 65 computer retailers showed December sales either met or exceeded expectations for 83 percent of the respondents.

The most popular systems were the lower-end Compaq or Packard Bell machines with either 75-megahertz or 100-megahertz Pentium chips and a package price between $1,599 and $1,899, the survey said. But those company brands did not command as much of the market as they did last year, said Michael Hagan, an ARS vice president. Computer super-stores drew more consumers than consumer electronics or office products stores, he added.

“Good, but not great,” said Seymour Merrin, president of Merrin Information Services in Palo Alto, Calif. “The ones that did the best this year were the computer super-stores and the mail-order companies. Markdowns were most common in the few days before and after Christmas.”

Murali Duran, vice president of consumer PCs at NEC Technologies in Mountain View, Calif., agreed that the season was good for manufacturers but said it didn’t live up to the hype that pervaded the industry last summer.

“We saw a big spurt in the last two weeks,” he said. “It was a late Christmas.”

Larry Sennett, a spokesman for Hewlett-Packard, said slow sales in November frightened the industry. October sales had been up because of the spurt of buying that continued from the August introduction of Windows 95. But shoppers seemed to look around more this year, hunting for bargains and deciding what features they wanted.

“Last year the rocket ship took off early,” he said. “This year, it wasn’t until the last two weeks that people decided they’d shopped enough and were ready to buy.”

Hagan said the reason for part of the surge in the last two weeks of the year was price-cutting on 75-megahertz Pentiums, which some analysts feared had fallen out of favor with consumers because the microprocessors were now Intel’s lowest-powered chips. He said prices have been cut across all models beginning this week.

Strong sales don’t always equate to higher profits, however. Apple Computer Inc., for instance, has said it will report a loss for its fourth quarter, despite an overall increase in sales.