APAC server market takes hit, but Australia benefits from stimulus

Peter Dinham
Tuesday, 08 September 2009 11:05

IT Industry - Market

Gadjuli says a combination of seasonal low server spending in the second quarter and a “still-cautious level of business confidence” led to further contraction quarter on quarter in server shipments of minus 5.2 percent and revenue of minus 38.4 percent in Singapore.
 
In China, the peak in purchasing in 2Q08 led to a drop of -2.5 percent year-on-year in the second quarter of 2009, Gartner reports, while shipments of x86 servers declined 16.6 percent year-on-year, and at the same time, revenue declined 12.2 percent, accounting for 52 percent of the server market.

According to Gadjuli, mainframes had another strong quarter with 31.8 percent growth year-on-year, “thanks to successes mainly in Australia and the South Korean financial sector.

“On the other hand RISC/IA 64 platforms declined at 23 percent over the same period last year.”

Gartner also reports that shipments of blade servers (including x86 blades and RISC/IA-64 blades) represented 12 percent of total units and reported 15.1 percent year-over-year growth during the second quarter of 2009.

Gadjuli says that all major server vendors experienced year-on-year revenue decline, except Dell, while HP retained the leading position in server shipments with 29 percent market share, and with the majority of them in the x86 platform.

In revenue terms, Gadjuli says IBM maintained its first position by controlling 39 percent of total revenue in 2Q09, but although IBM saw strong growth of mainframes in the quarter, its Power Systems “continued to suffer under the impact of global downturn and reported a double-digit revenue decline during the quarter.”

While Dell increased its share of shipments to 22.9 percent in the second quarter of 2009, Gadjuli says, however, that the company continued to feel the pressure of the weak economy as volume fell 12.3 percent year-on-year, although it had a “better picture in terms of revenue during the quarter as it continued to take advantage of its direct sales model that appeared to help in increasing its product’s selling price.”

But, Gadjuli says that because of the uncertainty surrounding the effect of Oracle’s purchase of Sun Microsystems, Sun’s overall server revenue went down 33 percent year-over-year while its revenue share went down three points to nine percent in the second quarter of 2009.