The news about PC sales market share in the US never seems to change. HP (HPQ) widens its lead. Dell falters. Asian manufacturers show regular improvement.
David Daoud, research manager with IDC’s U.S. Quarterly PC tracker, said, “The U.S. market exploded in the 4th quarter driven by a series of factors contributing to the unexpected 24% year-on-year growth, ” according to Apple Insider.
HP’s sales grew 45% in Q4 compared to the last quarter of 2008. Dell’s were up only 5%. Dell’s market share dropped to 22.4% and rival Acer’s rose to almost 11%. Apple’s (AAPL) improvement was very modest and its US market share is still barely above 7%.
The trends show several critical changes in the computer market. The first is the companies with many netbook products like Acer are able to pick up share because of their product mix which favors cheap machines. The second is the Dell’s efforts to return to the top of the market have not been successful. As a matter of fact its position gets worse each quarter.
Apple has lost its ability to improve its share by much, perhaps because the Mac is hard to sell to corporate IT buyers which do not want to support two operating systems and would rather only support Microsoft (MSFT) Windows.
HP’s momentum has not been hurt by its large share. It has not even come close to reaching a point of market saturation.
Douglas A. McIntyre
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