Dell loses top spot to HP, shrinks in growing PC market

Stan Beer
Friday, 20 April 2007 04:14

IT Industry - Market

Last year the clear worldwide PC kingpin Dell, slipped badly in the first quarter of 2007, to be a poor second to Hewlett-Packard. Dell has lost a huge amount of ground in the past 12 months in terms of market share and was the only major vendor to have declining unit sales in a robust market that grew by nearly 9%, according to figures released by research group Gartner.

Both HP, now the clear market leader, and Acer, which moved ahead of Lenovo into the number three spot, had fantastic growth spurts, with HP growing unit sales by 28.7% and Acer growing 46.1%. In contrast, Dell's unit sales shrunk by 7.8%.

In 1Q07, HP had 17.6% of the global market with 11.03 million units sold (1Q06 14.9%, 8.57 million); Dell had 13.9% with 8.57 million units (1Q06 16.4%, 9.43 million); Acer had 6.8% with 4.28 million (1Q06 5.1%, 2.93 million); Lenovo had 6.3% with 3.97 million (1Q06 3.42 million, 5.9%); and notebook specialist Toshiba had 4.1% with 2.55 million (1Q06 2.21 million, 3.8%).

Worldwide PC shipments totaled 62.7 million units in the first quarter of 2007, an 8.9% increase from the same period last year.

According to Gartner, Microsoft’s official consumer launch of Vista in January, had very limited impact on overall worldwide shipment demand on a quarterly basis. On a monthly basis, mature regions experienced a bubble in demand following its release. Vista adoption was primarily in the consumer and very small business segments of the mature regions.

“HP was helped by the Vista operating system consumer launch in the mature regions, and it is benefiting from a strong position in the channel,” said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst for Gartner Dataquest’s Client Computing Markets Group. “The first quarter of 2007 was a transitional quarter for Dell as the company began a major restructuring project.”

In the US, although Dell maintained the top position in the first quarter of 2007, it lost considerable market share to HP and is now only a narrow leader. Dell's shipments contracted by 15.5%, while HP increased its shipments by 25.8% wcompared to the corresponding quarter in 2006.