PC shipments up 14 percent in Q4

Chicago (IL) - Recovery of the worldwide PC market continued in the fourth quarter 2004 with shipments topping 51 million units, according to a report released by market research firm IDC. Small and medium businesses as well as holiday demand pushed year-over-year growth to almost 14 percent. Dell continues to increase its lead over HP in system shipments.

With record PC processor shipments reported by both AMD and Intel, market experts already had expected a healthy Christmas quarter for the PC industry. IDC is first to put numbers behind those expectations. The firm’s analysts said total shipments rose to 51.5 million units in Q4, marking the seventh consecutive quarter of double-digit growth in worldwide PC shipments and beating previous projections of 13 percent growth.

Shipments for all of 2004 reached 177.5 million units on growth of 14.7 percent, representing peak recovery following the market contraction of 2001. Total shipments in 2004 were more than 26 percent over 2000 volumes, and IDC expects growth of about 10 percent in 2005 before shipment growth slows to single digits.

"The fourth quarter of 2004 represented a milestone in the personal computing industry, as total worldwide volume exceed the figure of 47.4 million set a decade ago in 1994 for the entire year," said Roger Kay, vice president of Client Computing at IDC.

Following another quarter of strong growth, Dell is now the uncontested market leader, according to figures released by IDC. After ceding the top spot to Hewlett-Packard (HP) in the fourth quarter of 2002 and 2003 following HP’s merger with Compaq, Dell managed to distance itself from HP by a full point of market share in the fourth quarter for the first time.

Dell shipped 8.8 million PCs and stands at 17.0 percent market share, up one point over the fourth quarter 2003. HP sold 8.2 million systems and lost 0.6 percentage points to now 16.0 percent. Following the two firms are IBM with 2.9 million units (5.7 percent), Acer wit 2.2 million (4.3 percent) and Fujitsu/Fujitsu Siemens wit 2.1 million (4.0 percent).

Other vendor highlights include significant improvements from Gateway and Apple. While still losing share, Gateway showed the first signs of meaningful improvement following its merger with eMachines. Similarly, Apple saw a significant kick from its new iMac and attention related to its music business, reinvigorating a business that had been struggling to keep pace with the market.