The latest market figures illustrating the state of the PC market are out, and Hewlett-Packard, the world’s biggest PC maker, is still ahead of everyone, but the margin of its lead is getting thinner.
Market research firms Gartner and IDC both put out their latest market estimates today. And while they measure the marketplace differently, both show the gap between HP and Lenovo getting a lot smaller versus this time last year.
Overall, Gartner said, consumers and businesses snapped up 87.47 million PCs last quarter, which amounts to a fractional decline from 87.6 million in the year-ago period. HP topped all other vendors, selling 13.04 million machines and taking a 14.9 percent share of the worldwide market. Lenovo, according to Gartner’s estimate, came in second by a mere whisker, selling 12.82 million units, amounting to 14.7 percent of the market, and grew by a world-beating 15 percent.
Acer and Dell battled similarly for second place: Acer sold 9.65 million, or 11 percent of market, to Dell’s 9.35 million units, only 0.3 percent behind by market share. Dell’s shipments fell by more than 11 percent year on year. Asustek rounded out the Top 5 worldwide.
In the U.S., HP, Dell and Apple rounded out the Top 3, followed by Acer and Toshiba. Apple’s share of the market rose to 12 percent.
For its part IDC, pegged the market contraction at the same size that Gartner did, saying it saw a decline in worldwide shipments by 0.1 percent. It estimated that worldwide shipments amounted to 86.73 million units.
IDC saw a wider gap between HP and Lenovo, but estimated the Chinese company’s growth rate at 25 percent. It estimated HP sold 13.42 million PCs, for a 15.5 percent share of the market, to Lenovo’s 12.89 million and 14.9 percent share. Still slim. It also put Dell in third place, ahead of Acer.