Commercial Sales Helped Laggard U.S. PC Sales In 2Q

Worldwide PC shipments increased 22 percent year over year and about 1 percent compared to the first quarter, according to IDC.

“Growth was fueled by better than expected results in desktops, which are benefiting from an aged installed base with commercial clients. Mobility shipments missed expectations for the first time in recent memory, as previously resilient consumer laptop shipments cooled in the June quarter,” wrote Brian Alexander, managing director of equity research at Raymond James, in the report.

Part of the notebook weakness can be attributed to the introduction of Apple’s iPad, which is “cannibalizing low end notebooks/netbooks,” wrote Alexander.

In the U.S., PC shipments increased 12.6 percent, which was well below IDC’s expectations of 18 percent and a notable deceleration from 19 percent growth in the first quarter, according to Raymond James.

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Solid business in commercial PC sales helped offset a decelerating growth in the consumer segment, according to IDC and Raymond James.

Furthermore, Raymond James believes that the growth in commercial PC sales will exceed that of enterprise hardware in general for the rest of this year.

The organization originally believed that sales of enterprise hardware, including servers, storage, and networking products, would lead the recovery in IT spending as those products have a more quantifiable ROI and are more critical to a company's IT infrastructure than PCs, Alexander wrote in the report.

“While overall PC revenue growth may have already peaked, it is our view that commercial PCs will outperform enterprise hardware over the next several quarters as the commercial PC refresh gains steam,” Alexander wrote. “Moreover, the recent release of Office 2010 and pending release of Windows 7 Service Pack One (SP1) should provide incremental incentives for companies looking to upgrade a very old PC installed base.”

In its report, IDC noted that Acer is now within striking distance of overtaking Dell as the world's second-largest PC vendor after perennial leader Hewlett-Packard. Acer has been catching up with Dell in terms of PC sales for the past couple of years based on the strength of its mobile PC sales, especially in the Europe market

IDC estimated that Dell sold 10.6 million PCs in the second quarter of 2010, up 19.1 percent over its shipments in the second quarter of 2009. Acer sold almost as many, 10.2 million, up 20.8 percent over last year.

Acer is also the third-largest PC vendor in the U.S. behind HP and Dell. However, Acer's U.S. sales of 2.0 million units was less than half of Dell's sales of 4.4 million units. And Acer in the U.S. saw its sales grow only 1.0 percent over last year, compared to a 10.9-percent growth rate for Dell.

Alexander noted that HP’s worldwide PC unit sales increased 12 percent, marking the company’s single largest share loss since the fourth quarter of 2002 and its second consecutive quarter of at least 100 basis points of share loss.

“This is entirely due to relatively soft unit growth outside of the U.S.,” Alexander worte. “That said, HP still holds the worldwide unit share lead at 18.1 percent, which declined roughly 160 basic poinst vs. prior year levels.”

In the U.S., HP maintained its lead with a 25.7 percent unit share, up 35 basis points year-over-year.

Meanwhile, Dell ceded global market share for the eighth consecutive quarter, but its rate of share loss has improved, according to Raymond James.

“We believe Dell was a likely beneficiary from a continued rebound in corporate PC demand, given Dell's outsized exposure to the commercial segment (about 67 percent of PC sales),” Alexander wrote.

Joseph F. Kovar contributed to this article.