IBM regains No. 1 spot in server market
Published: 12 Feb 2002 16:30 GMT
The first glimpse of 2001 server sales shows IBM gaining over its competitors, increasing its revenue despite a US market that plunged 23 percent.
According to Gartner Dataquest figures for the United States, IBM revenue increased 7.8 percent from $4.7bn to $4.9bn. Big Blue regained the No. 1 spot it lost to Sun Microsystems for 2000 sales, increasing market share from 21.5 percent in 2000 to 29.3 percent in 2001 while Sun waned from 22 percent to 21.4 percent.
Rivals Hewlett-Packard, Compaq and Dell also lost share and saw diminishing revenue.
Server companies had been accustomed to heavy demand and high profits from Internet and more mainstream companies, but the Internet implosion and economic turmoil led to lower shipments and intense pricing pressure.
The overall US server market shrank 23 percent from $21.8bn to $16.7bn, Gartner said.
The Unix server market -- the sweet spot with comparatively high price tags and high product shipment volumes -- also shrank dramatically, dropping 25 percent from $10.3bn to $7.7bn.
Sun maintained a strong first place in Unix while losing some share to IBM. Sun's Unix server revenue dropped from $4.8bn in 2000 to $3.6bn in 2001, while its market share increased a mere smidgen from 46.3 percent to 46.4 percent.
IBM solidified its second-place rank with $1.3bn in Unix server sales -- an increase of 3.1 percent to 20.9 percent of the market. HP, in third place, dropped 0.5 percent to 16.6 percent.
The Intel server market dropped 27.6 percent from $9.3bn to $6.7bn, Gartner said.
Compaq and Dell were neck-in-neck, with 26.4 percent and 26.2 percent of the Intel server market, respectively. But Dell gained at Compaq's expense, growing 0.7 percent while Compaq dropped 2.16 percent.
Meanwhile, IBM posted the largest gain, 1.6 percent to a third-place 12.4 percent.
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