Compaq takes top spot in PC industry figures

By PETER GRIFFIN

The latest PC industry figures from research company IDC show Compaq stealing the top spot across the board, but questions still surround whether IDC's figures for the desktop PC market add up.

The PC market grew 4.3 per cent in the three months to March 31 and 2.9 per cent year on year, according to the analyst group, with a total of just over 86,000 PCs selling in the period.

Compaq had a 23.4 per cent slice of the market and was followed by its new parent Hewlett Packard , third-placed Dell, local assembler The PC Company and IBM.

Compaq held top spot also in the desktop market with a 20.4 per cent share, the server market (41 per cent) and the laptop market (33.1 per cent) where it pushed rival Toshiba from the throne, which the Japanese vendor had held since 1994.

IDC analyst Darian Bird said that change was largely down to strong retail sales of laptops."Compaq has their AMD Presario models which they sell through retailers and are doing incredibly well," he said.

The laptop market showed quarter on quarter growth of over 10 per cent, desktop sales rose 3.5 per cent while server sales shrank nearly 11 per cent.

Year on year sales of desktop PCs shrank 1.2 per cent to 67,381 units.In the consumer PC market, Bird said a bundled offering from Hewlett Packard entering the market at the relatively low price of $2000 had forced other vendors to offer similar deals, growing the market as a whole.

Colin Brown, managing director of The PC Company, said his figures for the first quarter were "a little disappointing" and he put that down to the success of HP's pricing.

"The specification they are selling is a pretty poor one, but at the same time they've certainly sold a lot of them which shows the power of their brand," said Brown.

The PC Company holds fourth place in the overall market with market share of around 8.5 per cent.IDC is still in discussions with Microsoft to reconcile a major discrepancy in the two organisations' sales figures for the PC market.

Microsoft's new managing director Ross Peat said earlier this month that he expected desktop sales for the year ending in June to come in at between 260,000 and 270,000 units based on the number of Microsoft operating system licences sold.

That, said Peat, would equate to a 10 per cent decrease on the year ended June 30 last year, when around 290,000 PCs were sold.

IDC however is forecasting PC sales exluding servers this calendar year at 343,000, up from 322,000 last year.

Bird said it was not accurate to merely look at Microsoft's licence sales."It's not as clear cut as them having numbers of [software] licences for New Zealand.

It's a case of how they split up the region and the reporting level they have for each country. Where the reporting lines come from determine the numbers."

"We're still very confident that our numbers are right, but it's in both our interests to make sure we agree [on the figures]," Bird added.

Ross Peat was unavailable for comment.It's not the first time IDC's PC market figures have been questioned.

Early in 1999, responding to pressure from both Intel and Microsoft, IDC found 30,000 more PCs were sold in 1998 than previously estimated.

Information provided by Intel and Microsoft lead IDC to revise 1998 total PC figure up from 238,000 to 268,000 units representing $805 million in sales.

It also adjusted 1997 numbers from 213,000 units to 242,000.IDC gathers its market research by asking PC vendors how many units they sell each quarter and then cross checks numbers with other information sources.