Apple’s rosy quarterly financial report on Wednesday showed double-digit growth for the second straight quarter. Regardless, research firm IDC reported that Apple actually lost marketshare for 2003, comparing shipments of PCs in the United States.
IDC reported that shipments of personal computers grew in double digits — 11.4 percent — for 2003, the first time the research firm has recorded that sort of growth since 2000. The big winners were HP and Dell, reporting 21 and 20 percent growth for the year respectively. IDC said that Apple’s new product introductions in the fourth quarter helped the company.
IDC ranked Apple fifth for U.S. PC shipments, behind Dell, HP, IBM and Gateway. The company said that Apple shipped about 1.675 million in 2003, for a market share of about 3.2 percent. Apple shipped about 1.679 million computers in 2002 for a 3.5 percent marketshare, down 0.2 percent.
IDC defines PCs in this context as desktop, notebook, ultra portable and server systems — it excludes handhelds for this report, and bases its figures on calendar periods, as opposed to each individual vendor’s fiscal year. IDC counts shipments to distribution channels and end users, inclusively.
By comparison, Dell shipped 16.319 million computers for the same period, for about a 30.9 percent share. HP shipped 10.851 million systems, or 20.6 percent. IBM and Gateway rounded out the top 5 with 2.748 and 1.987 million systems, for market shares of 5.2 and 3.8 percent respectively. Other smaller vendors rounded out the remaining 36.3 percent.
IDC and MacCentral.com are both owned by IDG.