HP retakes primacy as global IT market grows

Hewlett Packard has regained its position as the world’s largest PC vendor, growing by nine per cent to take 19.9 per cent of the global market share.

Acer has also enjoyed a massive boost in sales of 23.6 per cent, primarily due to increasing demand from the Chinese market and the global popularity of its netbook products, while Dell’s sales have fallen 6.7 per cent year-on-year leaving the US vendor in third place, despite seeing its second consecutive quarter of growth this year and being the number one vendor in the US.

These developments have taken place as PC shipments have risen in both the United States and Asia.

According to Gartner, US shipment growth has come at the cost of decline retail prices.

“The consumer mobile PC market drove US shipment growth in the third quarter of 2009, fuelled by back to school sales,” commented Gartner principal analyst Mikako Kitagawa. “However, the results came with a revenue loss because of very steep declines in average selling prices. Consumers were comfortable buying PCs, but they were relentlessly looking for bargains.”

The Europe, Middle East and Africa region continued to decline, however, with a 4.5 per cent quarterly fall in shipments buoyed slightly by continued interest in netbooks, which now account for around 20 per cent of the EMEA market.

“The PC market in the third quarter of 2009 continued to be weak across all EMEA countries,” said Gartner’s principal analyst for EMEA client computing markets, Ranjit Atwal. “While the market declined 4.5 per cent quarter-on-quarter, this indicates both a bottoming out of the slump and a modest return to seasonal patterns.

“We predict that the EMEA PC market will see a 10 per cent decline for 2009. 2010 will begin slowly as the launch of Windows 7 in the coming days is not expected to see mainstream professional market adoption until the second half of 2010.”