Dell retakes PC sales No.2 spot from Acer
After several years of growth and outperforming the PC market as a whole, Acer has had a bad quarter. And Dell has taken advantage.
Taiwan-based PC manufacturer Acer has grown considerably larger and more important in recent years. It’s worked its way up the PC makers sales charts consistently, and last October saw it leapfrog Dell to become the second biggest PC manufacturer in the world.
Acer managed this feat by stealing 14 percent of global PC sales during Q3 2009. This compared to the 20.2 percent market share of HP and the 12.7 percent of Dell. Acer upped sales by offering affordable laptops at a time when many people were either making the switch away from desktops or deciding there was room for both in their lives.
Unfortunately for Acer that strategy which has served the company so well in recent years now appears to be costing it sales. According to the latest sales figures from market research firm iSuppli, Acer has been relegated to third place once again, with Dell retaking the number two spot.
During Q2 2010, Dell shipped 10.5 million PCs worldwide (a 12.8 percent share), while Acer could only manage 10.2 million (a 12.4 percent share). Both actually shed sales from the first quarter of the year, but while Dell’s dropped by just 1.2 percent, Acer’s dropped by a whopping 6.2 percent. HP is still top by a huge margin, with an 18.1 percent share of the total market.
Neither Dell or Acer comes out of this report looking particularly good, as they’ve both dropped at a time when PC sales are once again on the rise. But why is Acer doing so much worse than every other company?
ISuppli thinks it’s down to Acer’s (over)reliance on laptops, with desktops not figuring highly in its plans. Desktop shipments are driving the upswing in PC sales, mainly due to businesses deciding now is the time to upgrade thanks to Windows 7. So while the likes of Dell and HP are benefiting from their corporate customers, Acer is losing out.
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September 6th, 2010
Definitely a lot to do with the lack of desktop focus. Many businesses are choosing now to upgrade parts of their network running on Windows 2000 (which is no longer patched by Microsoft) to a reasonable spec PC, and this is probably a large reason driving the desktop sales up, as many office based jobs need desktops (with laptops often being used for businessmen and teachers and not a lot else for peoples’ jobs, most of the time it is desktops still).