Acer Inc (宏碁) remained the world’s fifth-largest PC brand last year, with shipments increasing 23 percent from a year earlier, International Data Corp (IDC) data showed.
The global PC market received a significant boost from the booming stay-at-home economy amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and Acer was among the biggest beneficiaries of online learning and remote working, IDC said in a report on Monday last week.
Acer shipped 20.99 million PCs, up 22.9 percent from 2019, and took a 6.9 percent share of the global market, the report said.
Photo: David Chang, EPA-EFE
Worldwide, PC shipments last year totaled 302.61 million units, up 13.1 percent annually, it said.
“Demand is pushing the PC market forward and all signs indicate this surge still has a way to go,” Ryan Reith, vice president of IDC’s Worldwide Mobile Device Trackers program, said in a statement. “The obvious drivers for last year’s growth centered around work from home and remote learning needs, but the strength of the consumer market should not be overlooked.”
“We continue to see gaming PCs and monitor sales at all-time highs and Chrome-based devices are expanding beyond education into the consumer market. In retrospect, the pandemic not only fueled PC market demand but also created opportunities that resulted in a market expansion,” Reith said.
Lenovo Group Ltd (聯想) took the top spot last year with a 24 percent market share after shipping 72.67 million PCs, up 12 percent from a year earlier, IDC said.
HP Inc came in second with a 22.4 percent market share, after its shipments rose 7.5 percent to 67.65 million PCs, while Dell Inc saw its shipments rise 8.1 percent to 50.30 million units, giving it a 16.6 percent share.
No. 4, Apple Inc, finished last year with a 7.6 percent share on shipments of 23.10 million PCs. Among the top five, the company posted the fastest growth in shipments for the year at 29.1 percent, IDC said.
In the fourth quarter alone, global PC shipments rose 26.1 percent year-on-year to 91.60 million units, the report said.
Lenovo led the industry with a 25.2 percent share during the quarter, followed by HP’s 20.9 percent, Dell’s 17.2 percent, Apple’s 8 percent and Acer’s 7.2 percent.
Apple and Acer saw their shipments in the fourth quarter rise 49.2 percent and 48.3 percent year-on-year respectively, the report said.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by