Gartner: EMEA drags down global server market
Seven consecutive quarters of decline for region means it surpasses economic downturn of 2008
Analyst Gartner has warned of a more sustained period of weakness in the EMEA server market, as shipments dropped 5.9 per cent in the second quarter of the year, with revenue dropping 4.6 per cent.
All three EMEA regions saw a decline, with western Europe experiencing a 1.6 per cent drop, eastern Europe a 17.9 per cent decline and MEA nine per cent.
Adrian O’Connell, research director at Gartner, said: “Demand for servers in EMEA remained constrained in the second quarter. This was the seventh consecutive quarter for shipment decline and the eighth consecutive quarter for revenue decline, showing an even more sustained period of weakness than the one we saw during the economic downturn that began in 2008.”
He said the fact that the EMEA market lacks the hyperscale segment growth that other regions have means vendors in the region are more exposed to the global weakness in enterprise sales. On a global scale, server shipments grew four per cent in Q2, but revenue still dropped.
Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner, said there were a few star performers.
“The global server market remains in a relatively weak state overall," he said. "The only real regional bright spot was Asia-Pacific with growth of 10 per cent and 21.7 per cent year on year in terms of revenue and shipments. Canada was the only other region that grew in both revenue and units (6.3 per cent in revenue and 2.7 per cent in units), while Latin America was close to flat for revenue but increased by one per cent in terms of shipments. The US also grew in terms of shipments by 1.9 per cent year on year but declined in revenue by 5.1 per cent.”
“X86 servers managed to produce an increase of 4.5 per cent in units for the second quarter, and 2.1 per cent in revenue. RISC/Itanium Unix servers continued to decline 27.4 per cent in units and 25.3 per cent in vendor revenue compared to the same quarter last year. The ‘other’ CPU category, which is primarily mainframes, showed an increase of 6.9 per cent in revenue,” added Hewitt.
In terms of revenue, IBM topped the table with server revenue of $3.156bn (£2.042bn) and market share of 25.6 per cent, with HP close behind on revenue of £3.089bn and market share of 25 per cent. Dell, Oracle and Cisco were also in the top five.