WASHINGTON: “Although revenues declined, the first quarter of 2016 continued with a trend of low-level shipments growth on a global level with a variation in results by region,” says Gartner’s Jeffrey Hewitt, “the drop in revenues in light of shipment increases demonstrates that the servers that shipped during the period had lower ASPs than those that shipped in the same time frame last year.”
All regions showed a decline in either shipments and/or vendor revenues except for Asia Pacific, which posted 9.7% growth in revenues and 8.4% growth in shipments for the period. Western Europe grew 1.4% in shipments and 1.5% in revenues. North America posted a 1% increase in shipments but declined 5.9% on year in revenues.
“The real driver of global growth continues to be the hyperscale data center segment. The enterprise and small or mid-size business (SMB) segments remain relatively flat as end users in these segments accommodated their increased application requirements through virtualization and considered cloud alternatives,” says Hewitt.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) was No.1 vendor with a 25.2% market share. HPE was the only vendor in the top five to experience growth in the first quarter of 2016. Despite a decline of 1.4%, Dell maintained the second spot in the market with 17.3% market share. IBM was No.3 with 9.7% of the market, but experienced the largest decline among the top-five vendors.
In unit shipments, HPE was No.1 despite an on-year shipment decline of 1.6%. HPE’s worldwide server shipment share was 19.4%, representing a 0.6% drop in share from the first quarter of 2015. Of the top five vendors in server shipments worldwide, only Huawei and Inspur produced shipment increases.
