30.1.2023 | Market analyses TFTs, PC systems and notebooks are the ITscope ICT Champions 2022

What were the most popular ICT products of the year? To find out, ITscope looks back at the past few months and has evaluated the most popular products in the most clicked categories of the year on the ITscope platform. Apple and Lenovo did particularly well.

After almost three years of the Corona pandemic, more and more restrictions are falling away. This winter, the first endemic wave rolled through Germany and individual voices already emerged that saw the pandemic as over. 2021 was comparatively even more marked by the Corona crisis as well as the prevailing chip shortage and associated supply difficulties, but even in 2022 the economy cannot yet breathe a sigh of relief again. Right at the beginning of the year, new challenges hit the channel: the war in Ukraine as well as inflation are the topics of the hour.
"Inflation is causing enormous price pressure in pretty much all sectors of the economy, and the demand for affordable products is growing even more than before - we are also noticing this in the ICT channel. With ITscope, we offer at least a little relief here by making it easier for system houses to find the most affordable provider on the market. In addition, it is important for us and our partners that all processes can be massively improved across departments, including sales, in order to generate additional revenue and earnings," explains Oliver Gorges, Head of Channel Development & Cooperations at ITscope.

However, the forecasts for 2023 are quite positive: the Macroeconomic Policy Institute (IMK) expects inflation to be lower than in 2022. Although consumer prices are expected to rise by 5.1 percent, inflation in the previous year was significantly higher at 7.8 percent.

A look at the development of the click figures of the ITscope platform also supports the positive trend: Although a significantly lower platform activity is noticeable in all categories in the 2nd quarter, the figures increase steadily again in the following quarters.

Development of click numbers on top 10 products of selected product categories of the ITscope platform from Q1 to Q4 2022

Due to the consistency across all categories, this also suggests a connection with the extreme economic uncertainty. However, the rising click figures and falling inflation rate make it all the more positive to look ahead to 2023 - especially in the following product categories.

This time, the most clicked category in 2022 is not notebooks, as it was in 2020 and 2021, but another, no less important component in everyday office life: monitors. With a total of 94,076 clicks in 2022, they are the top category of the year. An impressive 38,388 clicks secure first place for the Dell P2422H by a clear margin - not a big surprise, as the popular monitor was ranked first in the category across all quarters of 2022. Thus, the P2422H follows in the footsteps of its predecessor, the P2419H, which held the place of the best-ranked monitor in the previous year.

In second place, albeit with just over 10,000 clicks, is HP's E24 G4, which also took second place within the category in some quarters. It is followed by Lenovo's ThinkVision T24i-2L with 9,647 clicks - the field is much tighter here, so the P2422H's lead is really unique.

Second place is not taken by notebooks, but by PC systems this time: 93,828 clicks, which is only slightly less than for the TFTs, led to a close neck-and-neck race between the two office categories. However, the result of the Lenovo ThinkCentre M70q 11DT beats that of the P2422H by far: With 63,119 clicks, the complete system is the most clicked product ever in 2022! 67% of all clicks on the top 10 complete systems are due to the popular ThinkCenter alone, which already achieved a very good result in the previous year - even if it wasn't enough for the first place at that time. Particularly impressive is the development of product clicks and price/stock/status history, which shows only slight declines in terms of price and number of clicks for a product that has been listed for over two years:

Price/stock/status history and product click history Lenovo ThinkCentre M70q 11DT (Prod. No. 11DT003WGE) January to December 2022

However, the gap to the second and third placed systems, HP's ProDesk 400 G6 and Dell's OptiPlex 3090 - Micro, is correspondingly large, with only 10,263 and 4,381 clicks respectively.

Third place in our annual ranking goes to last year's stars - notebooks. With an average of almost 25,000 clicks per quarter on the respective top 10 products, the notebooks still achieve a very respectable result. Unlike the TFTs and the complete systems, there was a much closer race for the top positions: The ThinkPad E15 Gen 3 20YG with AMD Ryzen 5 5500U processor snatches the first place with 16,248 clicks. It is followed directly by another ThinkPad E15, but the Gen 2 20TD version with Intel Core i5 1135G7 processor. Lenovo's E-series stands for business laptops with a clear design, top equipment and a fair price-performance ratio.

With a total of four places, Lenovo is comparatively well represented in the annual notebook charts, Apple follows with two placements and also sends the third place with 10,943 clicks into the race, the MacBook Air with M1 processor.

The chart clearly shows that during a certain "dry period" in the summer, when the MacBook Air was hardly or not at all available, the price increased considerably. It remains at this level, i.e. significantly higher than at the beginning of the year, even after availability has largely been restored.

Price/stock/status history and product click history Apple MacBook Air (ref. no. MGN63D/A) January to December 2022

As one of the first notebooks with Apple's in-house M1 processor, the MacBook Air is still extremely popular two years after its launch. The battery lasts for almost 14 hours and the 13.3-inch Retina display is quite sufficient for hobby users who want to use the notebook for image and video editing.

Mobile phones follow: With over 63,000 clicks, they are in the midfield of our top categories. Unsurprisingly, the frontrunner with 18,177 clicks is the iPhone 13 in the color Midnight and with 128 GB of storage, which was also in first place for the last three quarters of the year. Despite the fact that the iPhone 13 is not really a revolution, but rather a really successful update compared to the predecessor iPhone 12, it convinces in many aspects: The main camera has been improved significantly, the display is extremely bright and the iPhone 13 has also improved its battery life. In general, Apple takes almost all the top 10 places in the annual charts - only the iPhone 14 range is not quite enough, the iPhone 14 Pro scrapes past the top 10 very closely with 11th place. With a listing in mid-September, however, this is nevertheless a super result for the significantly reduced time to collect clicks that the new iPhone range had compared to older smartphones.
Samsung can only grab a single top 10 spot between all the Apple devices: Third place goes to the Galaxy Xcover 5, a robust outdoor smartphone wrapped in a thick plastic casing that protects against dust, water and even drops. The replaceable battery is also special - absolutely not standard nowadays - especially for a waterproof device. At around 200 Euros in the HEK, the Xcover 5 Enterprise is significantly cheaper than most other top 10 smartphones and thus outstanding in terms of price-performance ratio.

The year was also crowned with success for tablets, which are only just behind smartphones with 62,899 clicks. Here, Apple is also ahead with four placements within the top 10, but Samsung and Microsoft are close on the heels of the Californian company with three placements each. As in 2021, Apple takes pole position with the 10.2-inch iPad - but this time with the successor model of the 9th generation. Second place goes to Microsoft's Surface Pro 8 and third to Samsung's Galaxy Tab A8. The former in particular is very popular with system houses and their customers in the Microsoft environment and offers a sharp display, a high working speed as well as high-quality workmanship and is very quiet and light at the same time. However, you have to pay a lot for the Surface Pro 8 with a retail price of over 1,000 Euros. The Galaxy Tab A8, which is already available for 150 Euros in the retail price, is much cheaper. The processor's performance is more than solid for this price, but the screen's brightness and color have to be reduced a bit.

In the last category, graphics cards, the click numbers are rising steadily again after the slump in the second quarter. However, with 34,875 clicks, the category is slightly below the results of the other categories. Two very close front-runners with over 7,000 clicks come from MSI: The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti GAMING X TRIO in first place and the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GAMING X 8G LHR in second place. In general, MSI does very well with six placements within the top 10, PNY secures three places and ASUS one.

The ITscope ICT Champions of 2022 (products of selected categories with the most clicks) in overview