The IT market in the USA is booming – it grew by 11% to $584 billion in Q2 2025 and by 6% to $2,166 billion in the year to the end of June. The IT hardware market has been even stronger, growing by 13% in the quarter to $111 billion and by 10% in the year to $440 billion. In this post I’ll look the balance between domestic and international hardware sales to end users and of OEM component sales to other suppliers, as well the effect of increasing government sanctions, embargoes, restrictions and tariffs on foreign vendors’ success.My Figure above shows annual end-user spending by quarter since Q1 2014, where I’ve included Telecom service which is part of ‘ITC’, but not ‘IT’ of course.
End-user spending on IT hardware in the United States was $440 billion in the year to the end of June 2025. The left pie chart of my Figure above shows the market shares of the top 8 vendors. The largest foreign vendors include:
- Chinese Lenovo which built its business on the acquisition of IBM’s PC business in 2004 and its System x business a decade later.
- South Korean Samsung Electronics, which is the second largest supplier of smart phones (behind Apple).
OEM hardware sales – equipment and components sold to other IT vendors – totalled $242 billion. These products ship for inclusion in PC, smartphone, peripherals, networking and other products, as well as to cloud and other service providers’ datacenters.
US domestic suppliers earned a much larger share (77.2%) of the IT hardware products sold to end-users than they did (55.6%) of components and OEM systems sold to other vendors. Chip manufacturing accounted for 75% of the OEM spending, resulting in large market shares for Taiwanese (29.5%) and South Korean (8.0%) suppliers. Chinese suppliers accounted for only a small proportion of sales to end-users (5.4%) and for a tiny proportion (0.4%) of OEM sales to IT suppliers. The relatively low trade tariffs imposed by the USA on Taiwan (32% lowered to 10% in July 2025) and South Korea (15% – finalized last week) should favour the domestic US IT hardware industry, as long as they are sustained. 
Since 2014 domestic suppliers have increased their market share of the US end-user IT hardware market from 62% to 77% in the second quarter of 2025 (see my Figure above for annual spending to the end of each quarter. Foreign suppliers have increased their share of OEM sales to other IT suppliers from 37% in Q1 2014 to 45% in Q2 2025, when measured on the same basis.
US vendors are at the head of the worldwide ITC market and the US government has continued to support them to the cost of ‘foreign’ non-US vendors. For me the major issues in this – the most important of all – global markets isn’t what they US government does going forward, but how other countries change their trade agreements to support their own regional vendors. China remains heavily dependent on US software products, while the EU has very few indigenous vendors of note. Making all vendors pay the relevant local taxes would be a start!