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The number of laptops shipped worldwide in the second quarter of 2002 amounted to 6.9 million units, a 6.1 percent increase from the second quarter of 2001 when shipments hit 6.5 million units. By comparison, PC shipments declined one percent in the second quarter of 2002 compared to the second quarter of last year.
"Continuing growth in mobile PCs provides some good news in a worldwide PC market that overall remains weak," said Charles Smulders, vice president of Gartner Dataquest's Computing Platforms Worldwide group. "The mobile PC market grew in most regions except for Japan and Latin America."
Smulders also said that the US laptop market grew 9.3 percent year-over-year, supported by back-to-school purchases, as well as orders from educational institutions. The overall trend in laptop growth is attributed to factors like the narrowing price gap between desktops and similarly specified laptops. The cost of supporting laptops has also fallen, he said, due to better support for laptop hardware in Windows XP and Windows 2000.
Additionally, companies find that laptops are better suited to the modern workforce, who need access to computers while in the office, at home and on the road, the research firm claimed.
Dell and Hewlett-Packard were the biggest sellers of laptops worldwide, as Dell increased shipments by 10.6 percent in the last quarter, to almost 1.025 million, representing around 14.9 percent of the market. Conversely, HP shipments declined 0.4 percent to 1.012 million units as it captured around 14.7 percent of the market. HP was the only firm ranked by Gartner that saw shipments fall.
Toshiba, which has traditionally been a weak laptop brand in Ireland, saw tremendous growth with shipments up over 11 percent to around 885,000 in the second quarter, giving it almost 13 percent market share. Gartner attributed this significant increase in shipments to the growing popularity of Toshiba laptops in both United States and Western Europe. And the company claims that Ireland is becoming an ever-stronger market, with laptop sales up by almost 90 percent here between the first quarter of 2001 and the first quarter of 2002 and a doubling of its Irish market share in that period.
IBM, which ranked fourth on Gartner's list, with 10.7 percent market share, shipped almost 740,000 units, a growth of only 0.6 percent over last year. Sony, which came in a bottom of the list, saw its shipments climb by 5.2 percent to around 490,000 units, representing just over 7 percent of the market. Its worth noting that all other manufacturers accounted for almost 40 percent of the market and they shipped around 2.75 million units to consumers, 7 percent more than they did this time a year ago.
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