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Apple slowed growth of Dell, HP in summer

updated 04:10 pm EDT, Wed October 15, 2008

IDC Prelim Q3 2008

Apple has likely been softening the computer market share growth of its top rivals during the summer, according to early IDC estimates. The company's portion of the market is estimated to have shot up from 7.3 percent in summer 2007 to 9.1 percent just a year later, giving it the single largest growth by an individual computer builder of the top five with just over 1.65 million Macs shipped and a 32 percent total boost. By comparison, top-ranked Dell has moved just a tenth of a percent upwards to 29.2 percent (5.3 million PCs) while second place HP actually declined by a similar amount to 25.1 percent (4.55 million) in the summer.

Fourth-place Acer's share grew the most of the five, jumping from 4.2 percent to 8.5 percent (1.54 million PCs), but was accomplished primarily though its buyout of Gateway. When both companies are factored into the results, the unified Acer is predicted to have lost its third-place standing and dropped from 9.2 percent.

Toshiba, which regularly occupies fifth place, also lost a small amount of share year-over-year and declined a tenth of a percentage point to 5.4 percent of US shipments or 978,000 systems.

As is common in its reports, IDC doesn't explain the differences in results but does mention that modest help came from back-to-school sales. It also notes that Dell's overall performance was hurt by its still heavy emphasis on direct sales in a poor economy.

Apple continues to sit outside of the top five in the world, however, and would need to outpace Toshiba's estimated 4.6 percent of world market share, or 3.66 million shipped PCs. HP leads the field 18.8 percent and nearly 15.1 million PCs while Dell, Acer, and Lenovo fill out the middle of PC rankings.



 
Previous Comments

Cannibalize?!

10/15, 04:21pm reply

You must be eating your own sales to cannibalize. Taking sales from others is not considered eating your own.

ezylstra

Fresh-Faced Recruit

Joined: Jul 1999

+5

it's ain't stealing

10/15, 04:30pm reply

If sales went up for all of them, where's the stealing? Apple just increased at a fast enough rate to grab a bigger chunk of the pie. The size of the pie is not finite.

I really hate this kind of overdramatic reporting.

joecab

Fresh-Faced Recruit

Joined: Apr 2004

-2

Stop! Thief!

10/15, 04:46pm reply

Stealing? Really? Did the market share belong to Dell and HP and Apple illegally took it from them? Did Apple secretly just take the share through nefarious means or trickeration? Did they take something which they were not supposed to have?

No? Then they didn't 'steal' the market share.

testudo

Fresh-Faced Recruit

Joined: Aug 2001

-2

They just got confused

10/15, 04:52pm reply

The writer got confused when they saw the Apple logo and noticed someone had taken a bite out of it. At the time the bite was not cannibalization per se, they were just starving during the 1990s and had to feed themselves some way.

brainiac

Fresh-Faced Recruit

Joined: Sep 2003

+1

Looks like the

10/16, 01:15pm reply

Electronista editors agreed that "stealing" was a poor choice of words to use in this sales numbers article.
Good Work Editors! :)

Flying Meat

Fresh-Faced Recruit

Joined: Jan 2007

+1

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