HP Tops Dell in Worldwide PC Sales

Dell's PC shipments in all categories to US customers during the third quarter of 2006 dropped by 6.7% over the year-ago quarter, according to numbers released this morning by the analysts of IDC's Quarterly PC Tracker. It's not Dell's exploding Sony batteries that caused this, IDC believes, even though the company's portable systems growth has shrunk into the single digits.

While the growth of the PC market worldwide continued to slip by almost two points by IDC's estimate, from 9.8% in the second quarter to 7.9% in the third, apparently no one sent that memo to Hewlett-Packard. The company enjoyed a surge of PC shipments numbers worldwide by an astounding 15.1%, from 8.5 million to 9.8 million units.

As a result, for the first time in years, HP's worldwide PC market share just barely tops that of Dell's, but by just half of a tenth of a percentage point: 17.231% versus 17.182%.

In the US, Dell's once seemingly insurmountable market share lead now seems more within HP's grasp. Literally all of those shipments, plus a few tenths, were absorbed by HP, whose shipments gained 6.9% over the year-ago quarter.

Dell shipped 5.25 million PCs in the US last quarter, which is down from 5.64 million last year, and represents a drop in market share of two points. HP's US market share gained 1.6 points, shipping 3.725 million units in the previous quarter. While Gateway held on to the #3 position, its growth was nearly flat at 0.3%.

If there's a bright spot for Dell, it's that its US shipments did continue to grow at a time when the American market is actually shrinking, according to IDC, by 0.7% over the year-ago quarter.

In a statement this morning, IDC PC Tracker analyst Loren Loverde pointed to some deeper trends underlying Dell's numbers: "Dell has had some negative publicity recently regarding its battery recall," he said, "but it is hard to attribute the third quarter results to bad publicity alone."

With that broad brushstroke having been used once, however, Loverde declined to paint the fourth quarter with the same brush, saying there's really nothing in Dell's future that could signal a serious threat to the company for the remainder of the year.

News from Gartner Group this morning echoed many of IDC's sentiments on the market, including the ongoing changing of the guard for HP worldwide, especially in Europe.