Lenovo Finally Beats HP on the PC Market

Part of what the job of IT market analyst entails is the supervision of product sales and shipments, and how much of the total is accounted for by each company. We can safely say that the power distribution has shifted dramatically.

Due to various circumstances, but mostly Lenovo being very good at what it does (IdeaPad Yoga aside), the top spot on the PC supplier ranking no longer belongs to Hewlett-Packard.

Instead, Lenovo has jumped from its position (second place) to the highest, though the accomplishment does have the unfortunate aftertaste of “ruling a broken kingdom.”

We confess to a certain flair for the dramatic, and indeed the PC market isn't in that tight a spot yet. Nevertheless, sales have been dropping, enough to turn the year 2012 into the first one, after 11 years, when overall PC shipments drop.

But we should return to the matter at hand, namely Lenovo overtaking HP in the third quarter of 2012, with 13.7 million PC shipments.

That's the same as a 15.7% share of the market, ahead of HP's 15.5% (13.5 million, give or take). Following HP is Dell with 10.5%, Acer with 9.9% and ASUS with 73%.

"A continuing slowdown in consumer PC shipments played a big part in the overall PC market decline," said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner. "The third quarter was also a transitional quarter before Microsoft's Windows 8 operating system release, so shipments were less vigorous as vendors and their channel partners liquidated inventory."

We aren't sure what to say about that last part. Yes, Windows 8 hasn't launched yet, but it stands to reason that retailers and brand vendors would stock up on working machines in preparation for the release of the OS. We have even heard murmurs that notebook shipments grew 70% on month in September.

We should mention that IDC disagrees with Gartner over whether or not Lenovo shipped more. While the share it gave it was the same (15.7%), IDC judged HP to have 15.9%.

Whatever the truth may be, we are betting that Q4 2012 will remove all doubt as to whether or not Lenovo is the new leader.