APAC shines in gloomy Q1 for servers

The Asia/Pacific posted the strongest growth in server shipment (7.0 percent) and revenue (1.7 percent) year-on-year in Q1.

The US was the only other region to post growth, according to Gartner.

“While these two regions grew in both shipments and revenue, it was not enough to offset the declines of the other geographies – all of which declined in server shipments and revenue for the quarter,” said Jeffrey Hewitt, Research Vice President at Gartner. 

Worldwide server shipments declined 0.7 percent while revenue dropped 5.0 percent year-on-year in Q1.

“x86 server shipment growth was flat in the quarter, while revenue increased 1.8 percent. RISC/Itanium Unix servers declined globally for the period, down 38.8 percent in shipments and down 35.8 percent in vendor revenue compared to the same quarter last year. The ‘other’ CPU category, which is primarily mainframes, exhibited an increase of 3.6 percent in worldwide revenue,” said Hewitt.

IBM had the lead in the worldwide server market based on revenue (see Table 1). The company totaled just over US$3 billion in server vendor revenue worldwide, with a total share of 25.5 percent in Q1. This share was down 2.5 percentage points from the same period in 2012. In Q1, system x accounted for 29.3 percent of IBM’s total server revenue.

All of the top five vendors suffered revenue declines in Q1 except for Dell which grew 14.4 percent.

Table 1
Worldwide: Server Vendor Revenue Estimates, Q1 (US$)

Source: Gartner (May 2013)

In server shipments, HP remained the worldwide leader in Q1 (see Table 2) in spite of a year-on-year shipment decline of 15.2 percent. Dell and Cisco were the only vendors in the top five to have positive shipment growth, with increases of 2.6 percent and 33 percent.

In terms of server form factors, blade servers fell 5.9 percent in shipments and 5 percent in revenue for the quarter. The rack-optimised form factor dropped 5.2 percent in shipments and 2 percent in revenue in Q1.

Table 2
Worldwide: Server Vendor Shipments Estimates, Q1 (Units)

Source: Gartner (May 2013)