iSuppli confirms Acer overtook Dell

Acer has officially leapfrogged Dell to become the world's second-largest PC builder, iSuppli confirmed in a new study. The Taiwan firm's computer shipments jumped 16.6 percent year-over-year in the summer to nearly 10.74 million PCs, or a 13.4 percent share of the entire market. Meanwhile, Dell actually dropped 5.9 percent to ship 10.34 million PCs, or 12.9 percent of the whole group.

Mainland China's Lenovo was the only other company in the top five to see similar growth and actually jumped by a higher 17.2 percent, but its much lower 6.94 million PCs kept it in fourth place. First-place HP and fifth-place Toshiba were in positive territory but grew much more modestly, climbing by respective 7 percent and 9.7 percent amounts to ship 15.9 million and 4.02 million computers each.

In qualifying the results, analysts credit the company's fast rise in notebooks, where budget full-size portables as well as its mastery of netbooks gave it the edge. Dell, HP and Toshiba have relatively small footprints in netbooks and skew their lines towards slightly higher prices.

The results don't mention major vendors outside of the top five, such as Apple and ASUS, but the former's shipment of 3.05 million computers would give it about a 3.82 percent share of the total 79.88 million computers shipped this year and thus keep it well away from Toshiba. However, the Mac designer has in recent quarters grown faster than most of its competitors and is estimated to grow shipments 26 percent next year, enough to narrow the gap considerably if its competitors don't improve by a similar amount.

By Electronista Staff