Apple’s share of the global PC market hit the 5 percent mark for the first time in 15 years in the last quarter.
That’s according to analyst Charlie Wolf of Needham and Co., who said that the growth of Mac shipments had out-performed the rest of the PC market for the 22nd quarter in succession, reports Apple Insider.
Apple sold 4.89 million Macs in the last quarter, the company announced in its fiscal Q4 2011 results conference call last month, a record for the company. In fact, the total was greater than for any entire year before 2006, Wolf said.
The record results pushed Apple’s share of the global PC market beyond the five percent mark for the first time since 1996, according to Wolf’s calculations.
“More impressively, the growth in Mac shipments in the past year represented 20 percent of the growth in worldwide PC shipments,” Wolf said in a note to investors.
Apple performed well in the home and business markets, Wolf said, with a 25.6 percent growth in the home market, compared to just four percent growth in the home PC market overall.
In the business market, Apple’s growth was a staggering 43.8 percent, compared to 4.8 percent growth for the overall business PC market.
The picture was not so rosy in the education market, though, where there was 2.9 percent growth in Mac sales, compared to 16.9 percent for the whole of the education market. Apple’s sales to government declined by 0.6 percent, Wolf said. However, the poor performance in these markets can be put down to the iPad cannibalising the market.
Wolf attributed much of the growth in the Mac sales to the Asia Pacific region, with Japan not far behind. “The growth of Apple’s sales in China represents a perfect storm between an iconic brand and a rapidly growing middle class that’s more brand conscious than consumers in most other regions of the globe,” said Wolf.