A bit more like it
Over 90 million PCs were shipped in the last quarter of 2009, which represented a 22.1 percent increase on the same period in 2008. This was the fastest year-on-year growth recorded by Gartner for seven years.
Now, while it's great news that the PC market is experiencing such growth, this has to be viewed in the context of an apocalyptic Q4 of 2008. Lehman went kaput in September of that year and the economy pretty much shut up shop, with sales falling off a cliff.
On the flip side, it's not like the economy is exactly firing on all cylinders now, so such a big improvement is still good news. We still have to wait for the recovery in business spend, however, as this growth was once more fuelled by low-price consumer notebooks.
Among the vendors, Acer and Lenovo were once more the big gainers, mainly at the expense of Dell and smaller PC makers. Acer did especially well in EMEA, where overall growth was a lot more modest. A strong performance from ASUS once more reveals the importance of the mini-notebook in keeping up the numbers.
"The EMEA PC market was finally on the upward growth curve in the fourth quarter of 2009, and was the last major region across the world to do so," said Ranjit Atwal, principal analyst at Gartner. "The quarter over quarter increase was nearly 17 percent indicating a return to seasonal patterns."
Table 3
Preliminary EMEA PC Vendor Unit Shipment Estimates for 4Q09 (Thousands of Units)
|
Company |
4Q09 Shipments |
4Q09 Market Share (%) |
4Q08 Shipments |
4Q08 Market Share (%) |
4Q09-4Q08 Growth (%) |
|
Hewlett-Packard |
6,012 |
20.3 |
6,170 |
21.6 |
-2.6 |
|
Acer |
5,888 |
19.9 |
4,295 |
15.0 |
37.1 |
|
Dell Inc. |
2,716 |
9.2 |
2,642 |
9.2 |
2.8 |
|
ASUS |
2,389 |
8.1 |
2,017 |
7.0 |
18.4 |
|
Toshiba |
1,730 |
5.8 |
1,732 |
6.0 |
-0.1 |
|
Others |
10,927 |
36.8 |
11,773 |
41.1 |
-7.2 |
|
Total |
29,663 |
100.0 |
28,629 |
100.0 |
3.6 |
Note: Data includes desk-based PCs, mobile PCs and X86 servers.
Source: Gartner (January 2010)
