Gartner has just released preliminary numbers for this year's first quarter PC market, and it reckons that worldwide PC shipments grew by 12.3% to 71.1 million units compared to 07Q1. The main news is that Dell -- now back under Michael Dell's control -- is staging a recovery. It's still behind Hewlett-Packard, but growing faster.
Also, all the top 5 grew strongly, so there was effectively a shift towards the major brand names. The "others" category lost 3.6 percentage points of market share, falling to 46.3%, in spite of recent successes such as Apple and Asus.
The US PC market was soft, growing only 3%. However, as Gartner says:
Dell extended its lead in the US PC market with its market share reaching 31.4%. Dell's channel program, Partner Direct, launched in December 2007, started yielding dividends, as well as its retail expansion. HP registered its lowest year-on-year growth since the Compaq merger in 2003.
Acer appeared to decline, but its new numbers include Gateway's consumer shipments and Packard Bell sales, following takeovers. Whether it can turn these around is open to doubt.
Apple grew fastest, among the leading US brands, gaining 1.4 percentage points to take 6.6% of the US market. Apple's climb has been assisted by the disappearance of most of the major US-based PC manufacturers -- Compaq, IBM, Gateway, Packard Bell and eMachines were all former Top 5 members -- but it has overtaken Japan's Sony and now Toshiba to reach fourth place. Taiwan's Acer, a newcomer and not well established in the US market, now looks within reach.
In Europe, HP took top spot with 28% growth, ahead of Acer and Dell. Toshiba, in fifth place, grew shipments by 36.1% and is closing on Fujitsu Siemens. Gartner says all the vendors benefited from strong growth in mobile PC sales, "with Lenovo, Asus and Sony reaching growth well above the market average."
Gartner also says: "In Asia/Pacific, PC shipments reached 19.1 million units in the first quarter of 2008, a 19% increase from the same period last year." Latin America PC shipments grew 19.1% to 6.3 million units. PC shipments in Japan grew 0.6% to 4.1 million units.
