Dell's computer shipments have continued a steep decline, as competitors including Acer, Toshiba and Apple have gained market share. The latest data from research firm Gartner appears to corroborate many points from an earlier report issued from IDC.
Mozilla's Firefox browser cut significantly into Microsoft's market share of web browsers in August, data from Net Applications shows. Its increase to 22.98 percent of the market wasn't an absolute high but resulted in Internet Explorer reaching an all-time low of 66.97 percent, a sharp fall from 67.68 percent just a month earlier. Other browsers also made inroads, as Google Chrome climbed to 2.84 percent (fourth place) and Opera rose slightly to 2.04 percent (fifth place).
Net Applications has revised its web share reports to improve the accuracy of its findings, although the adjustments have drastically changed the data, according to Fortune. Despite a report issued late last year that showed Mac web share growing to 8.9 percent, the latest report for July has reduced the number down to 4.9 percent.
Second-quarter sales figures show Apple growing its lead in Western Europe's education market, with a 19.2 percent market share for CPUs and servers. Apple also continues to be the top education computer manufacturer in the UK, retaining its lead in notebook sales, and taking the lead from Dell in desktops. Gartner Research figures put Apple's education market share in the UK at 17.2 percent, according to MacWorld UK.
Research firm IDC reports that worldwide PC shipments grew at 15 percent in the second quarter of 2008. The quarter also saw Apple roughly tie Acer in the US market, assuming fourth place and missing third place by only a few thousand units. Demand in the United States suffered from the ongoing economic pressure, with rowth in the low single-digits. Dell continued its recovery with another quarter of double-digit growth, while HP saw year on year growth rise from the first quarter. Portable adoption continues to be a key driver, even though consumer share is generally at its lowest during the second quarter.
Despite tough overall economic conditions, the market for personal computers remained strong in the first quarter of 2008 according to iSuppli. Global PC unit shipments rose to 69.9 million units in the first quarter, up 12.1 percent from 62.4 million in the first quarter of 2007. Hewlett-Packard Co., Dell Inc. and Acer Inc. retained the top-three rankings with no change from the previous quarter. HP boosted first-quarter global PC shipments by 23 percent over the same quarter in 2007, to reach 13.2 million units. Dell in the first quarter of 2008 expanded its market share position by half a percentage point compared to the fourth quarter of 2007, at 15.4 percent, with worldwide shipments of 10.8 million units.
Apple's overall market share for computers sits at around 14-percent, but when narrowed down to only contrast sales of higher-end PCs costing over $1000 – since only the venerable Mac Mini typically costs less –that number skyrockets to 66-percent. eWEEK's Joe Wilcox writes that the NPD analyst group discovered that as the PC desktop market is down about 25-percent, with laptop sales flat, Apple has seen 45-percent growth in desktops, and 50- to 60-percent growth with portables.
Music products and services made up 36-percent of Apple's second quarter, while revenue in the company’s retail stores grew dramatically, with over 33.7 million visitors to its 208 stores over the quarter. Apple reports that it sold 10.6 million iPods, up 1-percent from the year ago quarter, which reflects the same seasonal rate of decline which it observed from last year's December quarter. Overall iPod market share grew worldwide in almost every global market, while the US share was 73-percent of all MP3 players sold.
Shares of Apple Computer Inc. are up $6.51 to $161 near the end of trading on friday, representing a gain of 4.21 percent. The uptick could be due, at least in part, to strong market share gains posted by the company in recent surveys from various research firms. Apple saw the biggest gain among the top 5 vendors in the U.S. market according to Gartner, enjoying strong retail sales coupled with "decent growth" in the professional market. According to IDC, Apple is expected to come in at fourth place and ship 950,000 Macs to Americans during the first quarter of 2008, earning itself an increase from 5.7 percent in the prior quarter to 6 percent. The increase is a 25.1 percent jump over sales in early 2007 and also represents more than a full percentage point increase in marketshare from year to year.
Apple's collective market share is rising, according to a web traffic report posted by Net Applications, citing that Mac computers have about 7.46-percent share, and iPhones claim 0.14-percent. Windows sits on top of the list at 91.58-percent, which has slowly eroded from 92.91-percent in the year prior. The iPhone was listed as having a higher marketshare than that of the Playstation 3, Sun OS, Nintendo Wii, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and several other platforms.
Apple's iPod business will likely grow in the future, according to one industry analyst, despite the company's lowest year-over-year unit growth rate in the product's history. "With the iPod user base as its foundation, Apple is establishing a Wi-Fi mobile platform that we believe will spark continued growth in the iPod segment," Piper Jaffray senior analyst Gene Munster wrote in a research note obtained by MacNN. "With 70 percent market share, we believe Apple is in the driver's seat in terms of transforming the portable music market into a portable computing market."
Strong holiday sales of both MacBook and iPhones resulted in significant market share gains for Apple during the month of December, according to a Net Applications survey. Mac OS X rose to a record 7.3 percent share from 6.8 percent in November, while the company's iPhone garnered .12 percent share over the previous month's .09 percent. The survey suggests that more than one in 1,000 people on the internet are browsing the Web with an iPhone, according to Fortune.
Apple has enjoyed a pretty active year, after introducing the new iMacs, the iPhone, Leopard and the iPod touch, but some analysts are predicting that Apple will have a tough follow-up ahead of them in 2008. While the company has brought in record-breaking financial statistics – Apple's market cap sits at $160 billion, up from $60 billion 18 months ago, with stock currently hovering around $185 per share – they have been breaking into new industries and simultaneously making new enemies, according to Fast Company. Steve Hach, a senior analyst at forecaster ValuEngine, argues that Apple's share price does not accurately represent the company's stature in the financial world.
