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Worldwide PC shipments increased about 15 percent in the third quarter of 2007, with Hewlett-Packard remaining the leading vendor in terms of shipments, according to surveys released by IDC and Gartner Oct. 17.
Dell, which had been lagging in shipments for a year, also gained back some market share overseas, but its U.S. sales of desktops and notebooks continued to slip as HP gained additional ground. The increased competition between HP, Dell and other vendors is a boon for both business users and consumers as the average price of the PC, especially for notebooks, continues to drop.
“In general, the trend is that the price point for laptops continues downward as buyers are getting more bang for the buck,” said Bob ODonnell, an analyst at IDC. “The storage on PCs continues to grow, customers are now getting 2GB of memory as opposed to 1GB to support [Windows] Vista and a lot of vendors are moving from offering dual-core [microprocessor] machines to offering quad-core.”
Overall, with about 67 million PCs shipped in the quarter, the market remains strong, even in mature areas such as North America and Japan where many households and individuals now have more than one PC, ODonnell said.
HP was tops in the second quarter of 2007, too. Click here to read more.
While the IDC and Gartner numbers differ slightly, both sets of statistics show that Dell gained back some of the market share it lost in the worldwide market in 2006. ODonnell said the IDC report showed Dell had shipped more than 10 million PCs in a quarter for the first time since 2005. Part of the growth is due to Dell concentrating its sales efforts in Europe and Asia.
In the third quarter, according to Gartner and IDC, Dell increased its worldwide shipments by about 3.5 percent and now accounts for about 15 percent of all worldwide PC shipments. HP increased its PC shipments by 33 percent compared with the third quarter of 2006 and accounted for about 18.5 percent of all PC shipments in the quarter.
The other top worldwide vendors include Acer, which had a 58 percent year-over-year growth in shipments, Lenovo and Toshiba.
In the U.S. market, Dell remains the top vendor, but its market share slipped from about 31 percent in 2006 to about 28.5 percent in the third quarter of 2007. HP, on the other hand, gained about 16.5 percent year-over-year and accounted for about 25 percent of all PC shipments in the U.S. market.
The other top vendors in the United States are Apple, which now ranks third in terms of shipments with a 7 percent share of the market, Toshiba and Gateway. On Oct. 17, Acer completed its acquisition of Gateway, which means the U.S. market will probably look different in the fourth quarter of this year.
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