Next up on the bad tech economy news parade: iSuppli. The analyst firm sent out an advisory Thursday indicating that it was reducing its PC unit shipments forecast for growth by a stunning two-thirds. The reason? You guessed it, the economy.

The changes mean that instead of the 11.9 percent growth it had projected back in September (with the way things have been changing so rapidly, that now seems like an eternity ago), it now sees only 4.3 percent growth in 2009. iSuppli has also revised down its forecast for 2010, although it does show some improvement over 2009 nonetheless: 7.1 percent growth, down from its earlier forecast of 9.4 percent.

Analyst Michael Wilkins directly mentions the credit crisis as having a large impact on larger-ticket purchases like PCs, and its hurting the consumer as well as the enterprise.

“The result of the financial turmoil is less money to spend, and often that money is itself more expensive,” Wilkins said. “With less money to spend, application markets, like PCs, have been impacted.” All in all, we shouldn’t really complain. The PC market has had solid growth for the past five years, growing at double digit rates. 2008 was to be the sixth straight year, but now it appears as if that will not happen.

Regardless of market conditions notebook PCs should still manage to post growth, up 15 percent this year. Desktops on the other hand will continue to see shrinking sales, down five percent from 2007.

No word from either Gartner nor NPD, which also produce PC sales forecasts on whether they’ll be doing some face-saving by tamping down growth numbers a bit.

 
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