DisplaySearch has reported in its Quarterly Notebook PC Shipment and Forecast Report that the notebook PC market grew 27.7% Y/Y to 78.802 million units. At the DisplaySearch US Flat Panel Display Conference in March 2006, John Jacobs, Director of Notebook PC Market Research, forecast that the notebook PC market would grow to 77.943 million units. The actual notebook PC shipment number was just 1.1% higher than the early 2006 forecast, for an accuracy of 98.9%.
In Q4’06, on the strength of unit shipments that surged more than 29% Q/Q, HP once again took the top spot in the notebook PC market with shipments of just under 4.7 million units to capture 20% share of the notebook PC market. The quarter was less kind to Dell, which trailed HP, but perhaps more importantly lost share as unit shipments fell slightly from Q3’06 to Q4’06, despite a notebook PC market that grew more than 14.4% Q/Q.
The other big winner in Q4’06 was Acer, which, like HP, saw notebook PC shipments swell 29% quarter to 3.1 million units, surpassing the 3 million mark for the first time. Acer’s growth narrowed the distance between it and Dell to less than half a million units. Acer’s substantial growth increased its lead over #4 Toshiba, which shipped 2.3 million notebooks in the quarter.
Lenovo also had a strong fourth quarter, shipping slightly less than 2 million notebooks. Similar to HP and Acer, Lenovo also beat the average quarter/quarter growth rate for the notebook market with 18.2% Q/Q growth.
MacDailyNews Note: When contacted by MacDailyNews, Carolyn Lowe, DisplaySearch’s Director of Marketing, shed additional light on the chart above, “Apple went from 1.036M (rounded to 1M) down to 969K (also rounded to 1M) – that’s a 6.5% (rounded to 7%) decline.” Note: that’s calendar Q3 06 vs. Q4 06, not year-over-year. In calendar Q3 05 Apple sold 634K portables, so year-over-year calendar Q3 05 vs. Q3 06 showed an increase of 56%. Apple’s 969K notebook units for calendar Q4 06 were a 65% increase year-over-year vs. 587K units for calendar Q4 05.
While HP led on a worldwide basis, on a regional level, HP held the top spot in APAC and Latin America, as well as EMEA, which it took from Acer in Q4’06. Dell held on to its lead over HP in North America; however its share advantage fell from over 6% in Q3’06 to a 4% lead in Q4’06.
Sony (40.6%), HP (29.4%), Acer (29.0%) and Lenovo (18.2%) all easily surpassed the average Q/Q growth rate for the notebook PC market. By contrast, Toshiba’s gains lagged the market, and Apple, Dell, and Fujitsu/Fujitsu-Siemens were all down Q/Q.
DisplaySearch analysis indicates that the varying degrees of success in Q4’06 between brands are a function of different target markets for each brand. “With an increasing number of PC buyers choosing notebooks for their first PC, and existing PC owners upgrading to notebooks from desktop PCs, a strong retail strategy is critical for success. Indicators of aggressive retail strategies for notebook PCs could easily be seen in the quantity and variety of Black Friday advertisements for notebook PCs in 2006 compared to 2005,” said John Jacobs, Director of Notebook Market Research at DisplaySearch. “Brands that had the most success in 2006 also had a wide range of product offerings during the holiday season, from entry-level to top-of-the-line systems, and often bundled these systems with printers and occasionally flat panel monitors.”
Brands that were hungry for market share were quick to drop the street price premium, even running “free upgrade” promotions encouraging customers to make the transition. Additionally, brands with a heavier reliance on the enterprise market faced the additional hurdle of convincing IT managers to embrace wide products and support additional configurations.
Looking a year ahead to Q4’07, DisplaySearch expects the notebook PC market to continue to surge, growing to almost 97 million units.
Additional details from Q4’06 as well as forecasts by size and resolution are in DisplaySearch’s Quarterly Notebook PC Shipment and Forecast Report here.
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Is this just how many flat panels were ordered for finished machines or a count of total flat panel orders including service parts?
Time to lower the price — a MacBook for under $1K.
There’s an entire swticher market that’s looking at that price point.
Didn’t Jobs claim 12% market share for Apple notebooks last July? Guess that’s US market share.
Just watched the Gadget show on channel 5 (UK) Showdown between a MacBook and a Sony Viao (Voia, Veiou) with vista. The result . . . the Mac crapped on vista, freakin’ marvelous. Vistas true colours showing through again, couldn’t build a movie.
Didn’t Jobs claim 12% market share for Apple notebooks last July? Guess that’s US market share.
Yeah, that was US-only for a single quarter. I still reckon the US share is a lot more than 4%.
4.1% ain’t bad when you consider it’s nearly double Apple’s overall global market share.
Mugwump said: Time to lower the price — a MacBook for under $1K.
There’s an entire swticher market that’s looking at that price point.
Falkirk: I respectfully disagree with Mugwump. While it may seem advantageous to lower price in order to gain increased market share, in point of fact it is “wallet” share, rather than market shar that matters.
In other words, Macs are a premium product. They are the Lexus of their field and do not compete with Yugos.
There are excellent articles explaining this on Roughly Drafted. I’ve enclosed a link to one such article. Highly reccomended reading.
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/FFE4A8E2-9816-4344-9FB0-61BED246674C.html
@ occam’s razor
Too bad you couldnt have the foresight enough to have been able known they were gonna do that head to head… at least
so you would have been able to record it, and then post it somewhere where we all could enjoy it too !
I, for one, would love to see something like that !
I imagine many people in the market for an Apple notebook in Q3 2005 were holding out until Apple released the Intel Macbook/Macbook Pros in 2006.
Pathetic. After all these years (post OSX & iPod halo factor) and hype Apple market share is shameful.
Folks, it is never going to happen Apple getting into double digits for market share.
(And desktop sales went down even more!)
Wallace…last time I looked, overall Mac’s market share climbed for something like 5 quarters in a row. WTF are you talking about?
Why does BMW get to be content with a micro-fraction of the worldwide car market, but Apple should slit its wrists unless it can sell more computers than Dell? The whole numbers game is ridiculous.
Interesting results to some extent
I would be interested in two other breakdowns as well
1) Knowing what quantities and percentages were sub-compact notebooks (a market Apple does not as of yet compete in)
2) Knowing what quantities and percentages were priced greater than 600 Euro/$800 USD or the equivalent Yen/Yuan… etc. (as this is the market Apple competes in sans sub-compact)
The measurements without this knowledge are equivalent to the worldwide market share of 2 wheel motorized vehicles – which include motorcycles, power assisted bikes, Segways, off-road bikes, scooters not allowed on freeways as well as many vehicles not allowed outside of third world countries (FYI for very good reasons – sort of like a cheapo laptops should be… a modern OS like Tiger/Leopard/Vista is analogous to pulling a reasonably weighty boat trailer on a vehicle in many respects – i.e. forget the Yugo for real world performance – it can’t do what users need – and they need to know that it’s time to look for a much heavier duty vehicle).
My feel for the real numbers tells me when Apple’s sales are genuinely compared with legitimately competing PCs at the actual point of purchase – the share of Apple sales is substantially more than described in this article – potentially even greater than the 12% figure Jobs spoke of.
That said – it absolutely does need to rise even more – and a sequential drop in the calendar year 4th quarter is not easily stomached. There is no question that a group of folks at One Infinity Loop dropped the ball somehow in not getting the proper message and product into the channel (without dumping BTW).
In other words, the 7% sequential decline is almost inexcusable – but the actual market share is another story altogether.
How good are sony laptops…I have a close friend who was going to purchase a Sony Laptop because his 1 and half year of hp laptop is constantly in the shop and will not probably make it past this year.
I convinced him to get a MacBook Pro….but just out of curiosity how do Sony laptops compare to apple laptops from a hardware and quality perspective?
I know gateway, dell, & hp sucks…but I never owned a Sony.
Can anyone share their experience with
@ Wallace
“Pathetic. After all these years (post OSX & iPod halo factor) and hype Apple market share is shameful.
Folks, it is never going to happen Apple getting into double digits for market share.”
Uh read this
While Apple is cited by Gartner and IDC as selling around 5% of all the computers in the US, it isn’t obvious that Apple’s 5% share is the cream of the market; it’s actually worth more than the same or larger percentage shares held by rivals.
There were 9.8 million Macs sold in the last two years, up from 6.2 million in the previous two year period. Those numbers don’t compare with the stunning volume of PCs shipped by HP and Dell–which each sold 38 million PCs in 2006 alone–but Apple’s profits do.
In the forth quarter of last year, HP and Dell combined sold 10 times as many PCs as Apple in the US, earned 5.5 times as much revenue as Apple, but together only ended up with 2.2 times as much net income as Apple.
In other words, Apple earned nearly half as much net income with its 5% share the market as HP and Dell together, with their combined 55% share of the US PC market: $1 billion for Apple vs $2.2 billion for HP and Dell together!
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/9EF16A95-278E-40ED-9E00-FBEBD75207FB.html
Apple has been in the computer buisness a very long time and has seen many PC box assemblers come and go.
Gateway and IBM for instance.
It’s not the market share that counts, but the PROFITABLE market share.
Eventually Apple’s cash cow will get so huge….
I just hate gay peoples
… are too fricken HIGH!!!!
Its absolutely ridiculous, in a world with Vista bombing and Apple mindshare grabbing every last headline, for Apple to be falling behind the growth curve of the industry, in any damn segment.
Jeez – when they were making PPC machines Apple sub$1k offerings were well represented across the board – Minis, eMacs, & iBooks. That hasn’t suddenly stopped being important just cause Intel is inside. If anything its the opposite. Yet the only stuff available are hobbled iMacs (integrated graphics & no bluetooth) and 32bit Minis (goddamn graphics again, & also a stupid-small harddrive). In fact, since Apple went Intel, it makes absolutely no sense to buy a Mini anymore – when you spec em out to overcome all their disadvantages, you wind up spending almost as much as for a full fledged 64bit iMac! This is totally stupid – what bozo is responsible for it? Why does he/she still have a job?
Apple should be killing in laptops – everyone I know would love a Black MacBook. They only reason they don’t buy is C-O-S-T. No one wants to pay the “color tax”, or a premium for junk graphics capability.
Get your head out of your ass Jobs. Apple has an even greater imperative to compete on price now that the hardware is IDENTICLE to every other box out there. Your OS is great, but it isn’t enough. Having the highend stuff is fine, but you also sell in a price sensitive market, and share matters – start DOING something about it.
~ A Shareholder
MDN word “firm”
Get it?
1. These numbers are very surprising, and at odds with other data – the major increase in Mac market share that everybody else is reporting.
2. So there are a number of questions:
– how reliable are these guys? (I don’t recall hearing about them before; are they part of the Microsoft promoting astroturf/crook/liar crowd?)
– It is clear that Apple computer sales are up significantly year over year in the U.S., and that notebooks are a particularly strong area for Apple. Taking these numbers at face value would mean that Apple’s increased sales in the U.S. were offset by declines elsewhere?! – this doesn’t seem possible.
– did these guys get everything, in particular, The Apple Store data?
– Apple’s calendar 4q06 (fiscal 1q07) financial results are at
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/01/17results.html
Apple reports 1.606M Macs sold, up 28% in the year over year quarter.
I’ve no doubt that iMacs are selling well, but there is no way that laptop sales are cratering – both, surely, are up to make the 28%. I’m not sure if Apple breaks out sales by desktop vs. notebook (I didn’t check the webcast), but I’m satisfied: DisplaySearch’s numbers are, virtually certainly, wrong.
– the big question is why?
– and what the heck is with everybody – doesn’t anybody check anymore? and this is a Mac site – Mac people aren’t supposed to be gullible sheep that blindly accept without question/thought… sheesh…
Apple needs enough market share to attract developers but beyond that it doesn’t matter much. Stock price is what matters and it is driven by profits, not market share.
If you think it isn’t all about stock price (current and projected) ask yourself how many pension fund managers make investment decisions on anything else.
I know I’m waiting for Leopard before buying my MacBook, so I bet many others are as well. A price reduction wouldn’t hurt either.
@Apple’s Prices:
It’s not always a good idea to lower price just to gain market share. What is the value of market share if you don’t have healthy margins?
I refer you to the excellent post by “Wiseguy”, above.
Lexsus could gain more market share by lowering their prices. ANYONE can gain more market share by lowering their prices. You can gain market share by taking a loss. Market share is not the be all and end all. Making money is. And if you think that Apple isn’t making money hand over fist, just check out any recent article on the valuation of thier stock.
Apple, please refresh your products more frequently. I’m seeing great deals on brand name (every major computer notebook maker) laptops that make Apple’s laptops look overpriced. Yes, i know Windows notebooks don’t run OS X but when you see something that’s Core 2 Duo with other specs better than and and hundreds of dollars cheaper than a Macbook it doesn’t bring more switchers the Mac platform.
How does Apple Laptops compare to Sony laptops from a hardware and quality perspective?
…now that people have had some time to kick Vistas tires … the timing for the OSX.5.0 release is like the sweet breeze of a wrecking ball as it swings by on its way to Redmond. I hear the screaming of morons as the ball casts its shadow on Vistas hometown.
If these are in fact global figures, then Apple is doing well – as its overall global market share for both desktops and notebooks is only 2.5%.
Mac’s are more expensive up front, but cheaper in year to year costs
People tend to keep their Mac’s for many many years, I know of several school systems that still have 10 year old Mac’s and still running them today.
With Windows PC’s, you work for the machine. You tend to hate the machine eventually. It’s designed for work, it’s a chore. You’ll wind up cursing Bill Gates.
With Mac’s under Mac OS X, the machine works for you. You tend to love the machine, it’s designed for fun. You tend to worship Steve Jobs because he cares about the user expereince.
There is a large world out there that feels it has to struggle with everything because they think COST is a issue.
These type of people change their own oil in their cars, paint their own houses, mow their own lawns, futz with their unstable PC every weekend and hope to save enough money one day to take a lame three day vacation in Hawaii.
That’s the Windows PC world. Stupid, lame, mundane and boring.
The Mac person is enlightened, he/she realises that their time is valuable. They understand that the more they can do, the more money it brings them. Reliable, stable computers are their mainstay.
Mac people are fun, they are artists, musicians and certainly not boring.
Mac people are cool and Windows PC people are mundane.
PC type people come to us Mac type people for fun.
Mac people rule.