Report: Q4 PC shipment growth worst since 2002

Research company Gartner has released its analysis of the PC industry for the fourth quarter of 2008, finding that PC shipment growth was the worst since 2002. Just over 78 million units were shipped, marking an increase of just 1.1 percent from the fourth quarter of 2007. Aside from the number of devices, companies took an even larger hit when comparing revenue. Contributing factors included falling average selling prices and the expansion of lower-priced segments such as netbooks.

HP was able to increase its worldwide shipments by 3.5 percent, while Acer exploded with a 31.1 percent gain from the same quarter last year and Toshiba achieved 20.7 percent growth.

In the domestic market, Dell and HP shipments dropped by 16.5 percent and 3.4 percent, respectively, while Acer was able to gain 55.4 percent and nearly double its market share while kicking Apple out of the third rank for market share. The Mac maker showed a modest increase of 8.3 percent despite the poor economy, while Toshiba shipped 12 percent more units than last year's quarter. The collective group of remaining manufacturers saw a drop of 44 percent as the bigger names battled to gain market share.

Filed under: Investor, computers, industry, Apple
Other story tags: Dell, HP, Acer, Lenovo