As Dell was hosting its annual Dell World convention in Austin, news broke that China’s Lenovo has overtaken Dell to become the world’s number two personal computer maker for the first time. According to Gartner and IDC, HP grew 5.3%, faster than the industry average. This is a critical moment for HP’s PC area since former HP CEO Léo Apotheker announced plans to separate HP’s PC business into a separate company through a spin-off or another transaction. Apotheker also recently killed off HP’s webOS device business that it acquired when it purchased Palm Inc. last year.
Worldwide PC shipments totaled 91.8 million units in the third quarter of 2011, a 3.2% increase from the third quarter of 2010, according to preliminary results from Gartner. These results are slightly lower than Gartner’s earlier projection of 5.1 percent growth for the quarter. In IDC research, Worldwide PC shipments increased by 3.6% in the third quarter of 2011 (3Q11) compared to the same quarter in 2010. Gartner said that HP’s market share reached 17.7% and IDC put it at 18.1%. The HP growth, said IDC, was thanks to double-digit growth in the U.S.
Dell continued to make gains in APeJ and CEMA, but declines in more mature regions pulled overall growth down, leading to a decline of 1.6% year on year, said IDC. The company faced intensified competition in the professional space, where Dell has been traditionally strong.
Lenovo experienced strong gains across all regions as it continues its channel expansion and capitalizes on disarray among the other top players. IDC said that Lenovo has now outpaced the market by more than 10% for the past 9 quarters, and by 20% or more in six of these periods. As a result, Lenovo moved ahead of Dell in 3Q11 after trailing by a small margin in the second quarter. Gartner highlighted that the company’s expansion was boosted in part by the joint vendor with NEC in Japan.
In fourth position, Acer Group’s total shipments were down 20.6% from a year ago – the fourth consecutive quarterly decline – but IDC said that easier comparisons may help the company turn a corner in coming quarters. Gartner pointed out that Acer channels have been adopting a conservative position in regard to placing orders following the inventory issues.
Asus holds fifth place, and widened the gap with Toshiba, the sixth-largest vendor. IDC pointed out that Asus had a strong quarter, boosting growth to over 30%.
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