Pc Market Back In Growth Mode Lenovo, HP + Acer Show Growth While Toshiba Struggle

Apple is also tipped to have had a big last quarter in
Australia across both Mac and smartphone sales with some insiders claiming it
was there best quarter for two years.

The two big research firms — IDC and Gartner — both
released their predictions for the quarter.

Overall, IDC saw 80.8 million units shipped worldwide, with
manufacturers outside the top five such as Toshiba, taking the biggest hit,
dropping 20.7 percent (collectively) from last year.

Lenovo took first place for computer shipments, followed by
HP, Dell, Asus and Apple.

Gartner said that Acer and Asus came in fourth and fifth.

As usual, Gartner’s estimates of shipments disagreed with
IDC’s, differing only slightly except for shipment figures for Asus (Gartner
claims Asus shipped 6.2 million units, IDC puts the figure below 5.75 million).

Gartner also claims that PC shipments were up one percent,
rather than IDC’s negative 2.4 percent overall.

They also claimed that Apple shipped 5.75 million Macs over
the holidays, while Gartner did not include Apple.

The IDC number, if accurate, is significant for a number of
reasons — not only does it represent a 19 percent jump in Mac sales
year-over-year and a 7.1 percent share of the worldwide market, but Apple
enjoyed the highest growth of all manufacturers in the quarter.

In addition, it bucks an industry trend — sales of PCs
overall were down 2.4 percent year-over-year, though some of the bigger names
saw modest gains in the quarter. On the topic of Macs,

IDC believes the company sold about 2.3 million of its 5.75
million units in the US alone (Gartner, which ranks Apple as the third-largest
manufacturer in the US, believe the figure was 2.1 million). Again, if true,
this would mean that Apple has broken both US and world records for quarterly
Mac sales, gaining around 12 percent in US sales year-over-year.