STAMFORD, Conn. – In the first quarter of 2015, worldwide
server shipments grew 13 percent year over year, while revenue increased 17.9
percent from the first quarter of 2014, according to Gartner Inc.
“The first quarter of 2015 was
a particularly strong start to the year, with the strongest shipment growth
since the third quarter of 2010, when the market was recovering from the
downturn. It was also the second-largest-volume quarter ever,” said Adrian
O’Connell, research director at Gartner.
“The market was driven by
particularly strong demand from the hyperscale area, which benefited North
America, in particular. This comes at a time when other regions are struggling,
due to price pressure driven by the appreciation of the U.S. dollar. The
strength in North America was strong enough to offset declines in Latin America
and Japan. EMEA was barely positive, with 1 percent volume growth.”
“x86 server shipments increased 13.2 percent from the
first quarter of 2014, and revenue increased 14.5 percent. RISC/Itanium Unix
server shipments declined 2.9 percent, while revenue declined 3.1 percent
compared with the same quarter last year. The ‘other’ CPU category, which is
primarily mainframes, showed an increase of 95.1 percent in terms of
revenue,” said Mr. O’Connell.
HP maintained its No. 1 ranking in the worldwide server
market based on revenue with 23.8 percent market share in the first quarter of
2015 (see Table 1). Lenovo experienced the largest increase in the first
quarter of 2015 with 658.2 percent growth. All of the top five global vendors
had revenue increases for the first quarter of 2015 except IBM.
In server shipments, HP remained the
worldwide leader in the first quarter of 2015, but growth was flat (see Table
2). HP’s worldwide server shipment share was 20.0 percent, representing a drop
of 2.6 percentage points in share from the same quarter in 2014. All of the top
five vendors experienced shipment increases in the first quarter of 2015, with
Lenovo producing the largest growth rate of 239.2 percent.
In the first quarter of 2015, the regions with the highest
growth rates in terms of unit shipments were North America (22.9 percent), the
Middle East and Africa (20.8 percent), and Asia/Pacific (13.6 percent).
