HP's share of New Zealand PC market drops 8 per cent

11.30 am - By RICHARD WOOD

Hewlett Packard's share of the New Zealand PC market slumped eight per cent in the third quarter handing significant gains to the local PC assembly "white box" industry.

Preliminary third quarter figures from market researcher IDC show HP scoring 33.6 per cent of the total PC unit market share, down from 41.6 per cent in the previous quarter.


Leading local assembler The PC Company had 6.9 per cent of the total PC market in the third quarter and 8.7 per cent of the desktop market. The 'other' group of local assemblers accounted for 38 per cent market share, the highest since the fourth quarter of 1998.

This was up from 31 per cent in the second quarter, which was a drop from about 34 per cent for the three quarters prior to that. HP New Zealand managing director Russell Hewitt played down HP's 8 point drop and said the real competition for HP wase in the other major brands like IBM and Dell.

"In a lot of the volume stuff we don't play head to head with [the local assembler]".

That was in contrast to HP commercial PC product marketing manager Craig Stokes who said in the second quarter HP had learned "how to tackle the white box vendor".

Hewitt highlighted HP's lead across all the separate categories of notebook, desktop PC, and PC servers, and its increases over the same quarter last year when it was the two separate companies of HP and Compaq.

"We've just merged two massive companies and the bulk of this integration happened in Q3. We met exactly the numbers that we wanted to meet with our financial plans in Q3 so I'm not concerned about it," he said.

Total PC market figures for third quarter were down 9.4 per cent compared to the second quarter which grew 9.9 per cent compared to the first quarter.

HP aggressively promoted its PC range in the second quarter and local assemblers ramped up marketing to match.

IDC analyst Darian Bird said in the white box market had done particularly well with notebooks in the third quarter which had helped overall growth.

Notebooks were up 11.4 per cent over the second quarter but desktops were down 14.7 per cent. Servers were up 16.6 per cent.

Christchurch server vendor Insite Technologies took third place on the server list ahead of multinational Dell thanks to a large deal to supply hardware to Weta Digital.