"I Won"

Many, many years ago I first saw this Gahan Wilson cartoon in a magazine. The caption was: I won.

I was reminded of this old cartoon today when I read the report that Lenovo has passed HP as the number one seller of PCs. Wonderful, they are now the leader on an ever dwindling market. Someday in the not too distant future the company that sells one PC in a quarter will be the “winner” because no one else sold one!!

So here’s the rundown: Gartner shows Lenovo selling slightly less than 12.7 million PCs, just a few hundred thousand more than HP at 12.4 million, giving them both a share of about 16 percent and change, meaning they divided up about a third of the total of 76 million between them during the quarter. HP saw its shipments fall by almost five percent versus the year-ago quarter. Lenovo’s shipments declined fractionally.

For its part, Dell was in third place globally, shipping slightly fewer than 9 million, down about four percent. Acer and Asus were fourth and fifth, declining by 35 percent and 20 percent respectively.

The global market declined by about 11 percent, which isn’t nearly as bad as the year-on-year decline seen in Q1, which was the worst since records have been kept. But it marks the fifth quarter in a row of market declines, which makes for the worst such trend seen in the PC industry’s history.