HP Surge Continues; Vista Credited with Spurring PC Growth

The surprise in yesterday's numbers from IDC's Quarterly PC Tracker was not so much the continued rise in global market share for the world's new #1 supplier, Hewlett-Packard. It was that PC market growth grew at an annual rate a full 2.4 points faster than what IDC had predicted, well into the double-digit range at 10.9%.

And despite recent comments from executives from both Intel and AMD, who either nicely or bluntly qualified Windows Vista's consumer launch last January as a wash for their sales numbers, IDC analyst Loren Loverde credited Vista with giving the market a boost - one which he says is likely to keep on producing double-digit growth over the next two years.

But that growth figure will be an aggregate, and will not characterize PC sales in all segments and market categories, cautions IDC's David Daoud.

In a statement yesterday, Daoud said, "The shift to portables and related changes in various segments will force vendors to re-evaluate their channels and go-to-market strategies to adapt to the new market dynamics. Some of this restructuring has already begun, but it is likely to accelerate as Dell evaluates recent losses and vendors such as Acer and Lenovo change their strategy for the US market."

The bad news for Dell keeps flowing like water through a broken dam. IDC's numbers show Dell shipping 6.9% fewer PCs worldwide on an annual basis in the first quarter of this year, over its market leading figure in the last quarter. HP, meanwhile, shipped 28.2% more units in Q1 2007 - 11.24 million units worldwide - than last year, which not only eclipses Dell's Q1 2007 numbers but its Q1 2006 numbers as well. HP is now leading bigger, and by more, than Dell was leading.

But the spotlight doesn't entirely belong to HP. Had Acer shipped perhaps one more unit, it might have kicked Lenovo off the #3 position. As it stands now, the two are virtually tied, with fewer than 1,000 units shipped separating them: 3.97 million apiece. For Acer, that's an astounding 41.4% annual shipment growth rate for a company that warned consumers last October not to be fooled by what it characterized as a scheme to force them to upgrade in order to use Vista. Apparently, consumers didn't heed Acer's warning - to its eventual benefit.

For the US, Dell remains the #1 PC shipper in the first quarter, though with the rate at which that lead is slipping and HP's shipments are growing here, that lead may already have changed hands. Dell shipped 14.4% fewer systems to the US than it did in the first quarter of last year, for a total of 4.27 million units. HP shipped 3.86 million units to the US in the same period - a 25.5% annual growth rate.

Revealing the gulf that exists between these two brands and the rest of the field in the US, Gateway - the US' #3 supplier - shipped 6.3% fewer units to the US than in the year-ago quarter. The US' #4, with 41.4% market share, is the category IDC calls "Others."

This may be Acer's big chance, having already experienced monumental growth in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). "EMEA represented more than 60% of Acer shipments in the first quarter with growth above 50%, up from more than 30% in the second half of 2006," IDC reported yesterday. "The company also continued a rapid expansion of its Americas business. The strong growth boosted Acer to a statistical tie with Lenovo for third rank in worldwide shipments."