Dell takes tumble in world marketshare

The once-dominant PC maker Dell is growing far more slowly than many rival PC makers and is taking a dive in marketshare as a result, according to a new study from iSuppli. The research group found that the company's shipping numbers grew just 1.5 percent year over year; this resulted in a drop of its command of PCs from 16.3 to 14.6 percent of the world's share. HP in turn jumped by almost 16 percent to take the lead with 19.1 percent of all PCs sold. Lenovo, Acer, and Toshiba rounded out top five, though Acer is expected to push its share upwards after it finishes its takeover of Gateway.

The analysis firm typically does not publish information about companies below the fifth-place mark and so omits information about Gateway itself and other major computer makers such as Apple.

Much of Dell's apparent failure is a combination of slowness in getting its channel ramped up to accommodate new models and HP's relative adeptness at identifying the market, iSuppli says. The latter has devoted most of its attention to notebooks in recent months and often has a larger variety of stores that sell its systems. Dell only recently began selling its systems in a handful of retail chains and continues to focus heavily on desktops such as the iMac-like XPS ONE.

Filed under: computers
Other story tags: Dell, HP, Acer, Gateway, PC marketshare