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Look east for the new rulers of the PC market

The scorecards are in. The PC market grew by 14 per cent last year to roughly 270 million units, or 760,000 a day. Hewlett-Packard cemented its position as the biggest PC manufacturer by selling about 50 million machines. Taiwan’s Acer continued its explosive growth, overtaking China’s Lenovo for third place, while Japan’s Toshiba hung on in fifth.

Those are the headline numbers from the leading PC market trackers, IDC and Gartner, who both released preliminary stats last week. As usual, they are not quite the same. For example, IDC reckons total PC shipments grew by 14.3 per cent to 269 million units, while Gartner reckons they grew by 13.4 per cent to 271.2 million units. But the differences are not significant.

HP boss Mark Hurd has turned out to be a star, increasing worldwide sales by 30 per cent to 50.5 million units, on IDC’s numbers. In 2006, HP was level with Dell; last year, it was ahead by 10 million units. This year should be more of a fight. Michael Dell has responded by moving strongly into retail, signing deals with the likes of Tesco. It seems to be working.

Although IDC reckons Dell’s sales were down 4 per cent in the U.S. last year, it credits the company with 15.2 per cent growth in the fourth quarter, and 17.1 per cent growth worldwide.

Meanwhile, two Asian giants are battling it out behind the two American giants. Lenovo boosted its U.S. sales by taking over IBM’s PC division, and last year, Acer did the same by taking over Gateway. IDC commented: “Combined Acer/Gateway growth continued to be the fastest among the top vendors.”

Whether this will continue is still open to doubt, but in the long term, it probably does not matter. The U.S. market is in relative decline. It’s becoming more important to be strong in Asia. According to Gartner, the EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) market grew by 14.7 per cent to 92 million units in 2007, while Asia Pacific grew by 18.7 per cent to 70.7 million units. By contrast, the U.S. market grew by only 5 per cent to 70.1 million units, says IDC.

The decline of the U.S. is shown by the number of companies that used to be in the top five but are now just someone else’s PC brands. These include IBM, Compaq, Gateway, Packard Bell, and eMachines.

The Japanese have also failed to take over the PC world the way they swept the markets for other consumer goods. Companies such as NEC, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Mitsubishi, Sony, and Canon have not been helped by a declining PC market in Japan, where more than half the population does email and browsing on mobile phones (tinyurl.com/2h4wee). Still, last year, Gartner reckons Japan’s PC market did grow, by 5.1 per cent to 13.9 million units.

Apple has also bucked the trend, and while it is relatively weak outside North America, it has climbed back into the U.S. top five. IDC reckons Apple’s unit sales grew by 30.9 per cent last year, and it increased its U.S. market share by one percentage point to 5.7 per cent. Apple has yet to release official figures, and may turn out to have done even better: it certainly has in the retail market.

However, most PCs are not sold via retail stores, and it will still take Apple a while to reach Dell’s current U.S. market share of 29.6 per cent. — ©Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008

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