Lenovo is King of the PC Market, Says Gartner; HP Says No
It's a battle of quarterly reports regarding who is actually commanding the PC market in 3Q12.
It's a comical tug of war when it comes to who's the current leader of the PC market. Gartner says it's Lenovo Group Ltd. IDC Worldwide says it's still the long-running champ Hewlett-Packard. The latter company even issued a statement, backing up IDC's report, claiming it's still the #1 PC maker.
Still, both reports point to a 73-year-old company struggling against rivals like Lenovo and Dell while a new CEO brings it into the new era of computing. The company has spun off its webOS operating system into an open platform, and just recently introduced new products based on Microsoft's upcoming touch-based OS, Windows 8. It's still trying to figure out how to attack the smartphone market.
In terms of shipments worldwide, Gartner said that Lenovo had grown its market share of the PC sector to 15.7-percent by shipping an estimated 13.77 million units during 3Q12, up nearly 10-percent from the same quarter last year. Lenovo currently has a market value of $8.2 billion.
"We are establishing even deeper roots in each major market around the world," Lenovo Chairman and CEO Yuanqing Yang stated. "In addition to localized sales and distribution teams in major markets, we are establishing an even stronger manufacturing footprint."
As for HP, Gartner said that the company's global share of the PC sector was 15.5-percent after shipping 13.55 million units, down 16.4-percent from the same quarter in 2011. The report stated that this was the first time HP had not been in the #1 position since 2006.
Naturally HP responded to the Gartner report. "While there are a variety of PC share reports in the market, some don’t measure the market in its entirety. The IDC analysis includes the very important workstation segment and therefore is more comprehensive. In that IDC report, HP occupies the No. 1 position in PCs."
As indicated, IDC's report contradicts Gartner's findings, but only marginally. HP's share of the PC sector in 3Q12 was 15.9-percent due to 13,946 units shipped, a 16.4-percent drop in growth from the same quarter in 2011. Lenovo is listed as the #2 manufacturer in the IDC report, with a market share of 15.7-percent due to a shipment of 13,824 units, up 10.2-percent from 3Q11.
"HP saw shipments contract more than 16-percent from a year ago and narrowly held on to the top vendor spot. Distractions caused by its reorganization, challenges in integrating its enterprise acquisitions, and an unclear strategy to regain its course remain key obstacles," IDG reports.
Despite a slowing growth in Asia, Lenovo continued to register the highest yearly growth among all top vendors, the report said. Dell dropped into third place in 3Q12, claiming only 10.8-percent of the market with 9,499 units sold. Acer was fourth with a 9.6-percent market share, and Asus claimed the fifth position with 7.3-percent of the market.
"PCs are going through a severe slump," said Jay Chou, senior research analyst at IDC's Worldwide PC Tracker. "A weak global economy as well as questions about PC market saturation and delayed replacement cycles are certainly a factor, but the hard question of what is the 'it' product for PCs remain unanswered."
Reuters reports that HP shares finally closed 1.32-percent lower at $14.18 on Wednesday. At one point, shares dropped to $14.02, its lowest since October 2002, before the end of the day.
Now, in fairness, that old HP Pavilion lasted many, many more years than it deserved to given the inexplicable design of the cooling system. But one day it started just randomly shutting off a minute or so after booting. I took it completely apart, blew out the heat sink, put some AS5 on the CPU, put it all back together, and it sort of works, but it still shuts down when you tax the CPU. I'm guessing a temp sensor is shot...but really, when you put some black tape over the fan intake because the fan is no longer there, and design the cooling system so that air is sucked in through the keyboard, it's a miracle the thing lasted as long as it did.
Fixed it for you.
That's how old but proven tech is crashed by new and easier to carry around "gadgets"
~IvanTO
But I was surprised again when I poped open the side of the case and found they took the extra step to instal silicone gromets on the fans to reduce vibration and noise which explains why I never hear the machine running. Overall the internal quality is good considering the parts and what it is using, granted we typically use higher quality stuff while building our own but I will say it be hard for me to match that machine in particular at the price point it was bought for had I built one myself. (was bought on sale not retail, but still)
I own a y580 too, got it to take with me into college and I've also had no problems with it.... not to mention getting it for ~$900 base price was a steal
http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=HPQ+Interactive#symbol=hpq;range=6m;compare=;indicator=volume;charttype=area;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=off;source=undefined;
Yes it takes Balls to play with the big boys, and now they are reduced to starting next year as 'just another windows tablet maker' when they could have been the outright number 2 tablet in the US (which they were at the time of pulling the plug).
Man, I dunno. Do the keyboards still break when you breathe on them? 'Cause they were pretty bad for a while, and that wasn't that long ago. Weren't some of their button-less trackpads also pretty abysmal?
The two DV6's I have are incredibly good quality. No issues with the keyboards, screen or track pads. I was even surprised that they have nearly no bloatware installed by default. Of course I put my own Windows 7 x64 Ultimate on them, I have standards after all.
As I said, I was really surprised. Like many people here I remember the complete and utter crap HP used to make, only Compaq's were worse. After the merger i figured they would just end up making machines that were crap to the second power, yet someone in their management has decided to correct their bad name. The only real negative I can give them is that their BIOS is locked and extremely limited in options. Even though my 3550MX CPU can support DDR3-1600 memory, because their using the same base model for the non-MX CPU's they didn't certify on anything higher then DDR3-1333 memory. It's locked and signed with an RSA key so no way for me to load a modified unlocked BIOS.
Fair enough. Maybe they're getting their act together. I won't be turning my ThinkPad in for one anytime soon (my precious! /gollum) but good for them.
Heh.
Eh, now that's bull$#!+, but I'm not too surprised. It sounds like something Microsoft would want for Windows 8.
My ex is pretty hard on technology (dented my poor old aluminum Powerbook and lied about it for months, and that's just the tip of the iceberg) and she had an HP laptop that lost a few keys...now, that wouldn't have surprised me, but when you go into retail stores and see floor model HP laptops similarly missing keys (and the Lenovos, Dells, and Asuses around them are fine), it really makes you wonder what they were thinking when they designed them.
So I told her to get a ThinkPad T420; problem solved.