Long growth cycle comes to abrupt halt for Asia Pacific server shipments

Peter Dinham
Tuesday, 10 March 2009 18:29

IT Industry - Deals

“Demand for blade servers remained healthy, with shipments growing 13.5 percent year-on-year during Q4, ending the year with 49 percent overall growth driven mostly by large enterprises.”

However, Gadjuli said that small and medium business (SMB) buying had taken a severe beating this quarter as the mid-market was hit by a loss of confidence. Cash flow and credit issues were the main challenges in the wake of economic slowdown and appeared to have impacted the x86 server platform the most, according to Gadjuli.
 
Globally, Heeral Kota, a senior research analyst at Gartner, said that worldwide server shipments in the fourth quarter of 2008 declined 11.7 percent decline from the fourth quarter of 2007, while server revenue decreased 15.1 percent.

“The weakening economic environment had a deep impact on server market revenues in the fourth quarter as companies put a hold on spending across most market segments. Almost all segments exhibited similar behaviour as users sought to reduce costs and spending, deferring projects where possible.
 
“Blade servers were one of the few segments to achieve any growth at all in this challenging environment. Unix servers on the other hand fell for the fourth quarter at 10.5 percent in shipments and 13.7 percent in revenue for the year.”

And, the fall in revenues was widespread, with Gartner reporting that all regions apart from Japan saw a fall in revenue.  While Japan had a 4.7 percent revenue increase, Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) suffered the worst decline with revenues falling by 20.6 percent, and even the emerging regions of Latin America and Asia Pac suffered with declines of 12.5 percent and 14.8 percent, respectively.

Kota said that the global outlook for 2009 was a very challenging one, with the pattern of the fourth quarter more indicative for the level of demand in 2009 than that seen in 2008 as a whole.