Acer's Growth Hiccups as Lenovo Reclaims World #3 PC Maker Position

By Scott M. Fulton, III, BetaNews

September 6, 2007, 6:52 PM

We've been using the term "resurgent" in conjunction with Acer so often that you'd begin to think it was a brand name for a new PC model. But in the quarter just ended the surge failed, so to speak, as hardware analysis firm iSuppli reports unit shipments for Acer fell by 10,000 for the first time in several quarters.

For the second quarter of 2007, the "resurgent" tag belongs elsewhere: first to Lenovo, which responded to Acer's first quarter challenge with flying colors. Shipping 22.9% more units in the second quarter than it did in the first, Lenovo pumped out about 4.87 million PCs. In so doing, it bumped Acer in iSuppli's global Top 5 OEM list back down to #4, and took back 1.5% of market share.

And at last, the news actually looks good for Dell, which staked at least a partial claim to the "resurgent" title. It took back 1.1% of global market share, on what the company hopes will be its comeback trail, shipping about 9.5 million units worldwide.

Despite those gains, it wasn't Hewlett-Packard that coughed up any of its dramatic gains from the past three quarters. Number one HP too gained 1.1% of global market share, not distancing itself further from #2 Dell but not ceding ground to it either, with just under 11.2 million PCs shipped.

Dell's numbers are still down over the second quarter of 2006, but if that company keeps up this pace, it could stop the hemorrhaging.

HP's unit growth this last quarter "outpaced the expansion of the overall PC industry by nearly a factor of three," according to an iSuppli statement this afternoon.

As for Acer, expectations for the third or fourth quarters of this year, after its planned acquisition of both Gateway and Packard Bell, are high. That big gulp should automatically give Acer 2.5% more global market share, and would have enabled it to retain the #3 spot had the deal been closed in the last quarter, iSuppli said today.

Toshiba hangs on to the #5 spot with nearly flat growth over the previous quarter - another surprise stall. If Toshiba can't resume its former growth pattern, it could before too long find that spot challenged by of all companies, Apple, whose quarter-to-quarter Mac shipment growth was about 17% in Q2.