Lenovo takes its highest ever share of the workstation market

The PC industry shipped around 1.03 million workstations globally in Q4 2014, with strong growth at Lenovo, reports Jon Peddie Research (JPR).

The fourth quarter saw the first significant volume of many new deskside workstations built on Intel’s Haswell-E processor and Grantley platform, which helped bolster results. Workstation sales overall saw year-on-year growth of 6.3 per cent.

"The descriptor of ‘steady’ may not excite, but given the volatility in the workstation market over the last seven years, steady ain’t too bad. For those looking to forget the nasty economy of the late ’00s, and whose nerves were frayed by the up-and-down rollercoaster that came with the subsequent recovery, the fourth quarter’s solid growth will do just fine," said JPR in a statement.

Market shares for the big three OEMs were generally stable, with the only notable exception being another rise in Lenovo’s share. The vendor posted its highest ever 13.6 per cent market share in Q4 2014, up from 12 per cent the quarter prior.

HP’s share of the workstation market rose from 40.7 per cent to 41 per cent, while Dell took a step back to 32.5 per cent, down from 34 per cent. 

JPR analyst and Workstation Report author Alex Herrera said: "Today both HP and Dell are very focused on the market, and both are executing quite well. Still, Lenovo is likely to narrow that gap to the top two, particularly given that the hottest segment of the market is in its home turf of China (and Asia/Pacific, as a whole)."

In addition, the professional graphics market sits near record highs. However, the third and fourth quarters of 2014 followed up Q2’s record-high volume with modest sequential declines. The industry, primarily composed of the Nvidia/AMD duopoly, shipped a total of approximately 1.25 million workstation-caliber GPUs in Q4 2014, including both mobile modules and deskside add-in cards.

For more information check out JPR’s Workstation Report – Professional Computing Markets and Technologies over at http://www.jonpeddie.com.