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Sars dampens server sales

Staff, CNETAsia CNETAsia

Published: 02 Sep 2003 12:45 BST

Asia Pacific server revenue in the second quarter saw only moderate growth of eight percent compared to the same period last year, with sales hit by Sars and weak economies in developed countries.

Sars -- severe acute respiratory syndrome -- is the flulike virus that spread across several Asian countries in April and May this year, causing dozens of deaths and slowing down local economies.

Analysts Gartner Dataquest revealed in a report on Monday that the mature markets of Hong Kong, South Korea and Singapore saw small or negative revenue growth, with Sars-hit Hong Kong registering the largest drop of 29 percent year-on-year.

Asia Pacific sales, excluding Japan, totalled $1.21bn (£0.77bn) last quarter

South Korea, which was largely untouched by the disease, recorded a marginal rise of two percent, while Singapore rose four percent in the second quarter, compared with the same period last year.

However, server vendors found bright spots in India, China and Australia, which managed to push up overall revenue for the Asia Pacific server market.

India's server revenue surged 33.2 percent year-on-year, growing from $56.2m to $74.92m, becoming the country with the most growth. Australia's server market remained healthy, growing 16.2 percent in revenue during the second quarter year-on-year.

China stayed the region's biggest market, with revenue of $382.35m, despite growing by a modest 10.8 percent, compared with the same period last year.

"Continuous investment by the government in building the IT environment has helped to contain the overall impact on server revenue for China," said the report.

Across manufacturers, Gartner showed that IT giants IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems and Dell Computer remained in the number one, two, three and four positions respectively in market share.

However, IBM, HP and Dell grew at the expense of Sun and various smaller players. Big Blue's revenue share grew from 34.6 percent to 35.8 percent in the same period last year, while HP increased slightly from 30.2 to 31.2 percent.

Sun suffered a revenue decline of about five percent year-on-year, with its market share dipping 2.2 percentage points to 16.4 percent. Last year's newcomer Dell garnered 4.9 percent in market share, a growth of 1.4 percentage points compared with the same period last year.