Despite everything, Mac sales grew year-to-year
CEO Steve Jobs may be struggling with health problems, but sales of Apple's computers seem to be holding up.
In a holiday quarter in which the PC industry recorded dismal growth — its worst since 2002, according to Gartner Research — Apple (AAPL) sold more than 1.25 million Macintosh systems in the United States, up 8.3% from the same quarter last year.
Domestic shipments of Dell (DELL) computers, by contrast, were down 16.4% and HP's (HPQ) off by 3.4%, according to preliminary fourth quarter sales figures released Thursday by Gartner. (Click here for press release.)
The news was mixed for Apple, however. Although sales were up year-to-year, they were down 23% from the previous quarter — often the Mac's strongest because it includes back-to-school promotions. (Mac sales declined 0.24% between September and December 2006, according to company, but grew 7.16% between the same two quarters in 2007.)
Apple moved from third to fourth place in Gartner's survey as the Mac's domestic market share slipped to 8% from 9.5% in October. (See Macintosh share of the U.S. market tops 9%.)
The big winners last quarter were Acer (sales up 55.4% in the United States) and Toshiba (up 12%) — largely on the strength of their mini-notebooks (a.k.a. netbooks), which sold in large numbers, and at steep discounts, in the last days before Christmas.
Apple, by contrast, kept its prices — and presumably its margins — high over the holidays. We'll find out how profitable those sales were when the company releases its quarterly earnings next Wednesday.
Overall, worldwide PC shipments totaled 78.1 million units in calendar Q4 according to Gartner, a paltry 1.1% increase over the same quarter last year.
Below the fold, Gartner's raw data for domestic and worldwide PC sales. Note that in Gartner's global results (Table 1), Apple's worldwide sales are consigned to the "others" column.
Note that US sales typically decline between Q4 and Q1, but European sales typically rise.
Ars has a nice chart from a while back:
I'll wait to see what is written when Apple announces its Q1 results next week. Gartner and IDC should be looking at all OS X products rather just those with Mac in their names.
Apple clearly doesn't perceive that there is enough daylight between the iPhone/iPod Touch and the MacBook to warrant a new line, and didn't I read somewhere that the Touch was an unexpected big seller over the Christmas period?. Whatever, the most telling figures will be the levels of deferred income that Apple is enjoying as I expect these be driving company revenue for the future across the recession.
I wonder if Acer's growth proves the point that the iPhone is not a netbook, nor can it compete with netbooks. If that was the case, shouldn't iPhone purchases have grown nearly as much as Acer's netbooks. The sad fact is that Apple has been really caught with it's pants down by being the only major computer company that refused to build a netbook. In any other economy it probably wouldn't have made a difference, but with people trying to economize, netbooks garnered runaway sales. Even if Apple had sold netbooks at $600, they would have reduced Acer's sales to at least some degree. The media feels that Apple made a grave mistake. In the sales numbers it does appear that way. I don't know if it's that big a deal in terms of profit, but WS sure is making a big deal out of Acer pulling huge sales figures with those pesky netbooks.
I give it a rating of BUY, BUY, BUY. sales down 23% from last quarter during christmas. The back-to-school deals were too hot to beat, wonder why they didn't implement the back-to-school deals for Christmas? Seems logical to me, or maybe that is just a infamous "but" statement that may not be 100% true? BUY, BUY, BUY. Sales are down, buy the stock, its been given my blessing.
"The news was mixed for Apple, however. Although sales were up year-to-year, they were down 23% from the previous quarter" you say but what was the percent drop in mac sales last year when comparing the same two quarters? And the year before?
ex ped: Good question. Added this parenthetical sentence to the piece:
(Mac sales declined 0.24% between September and December 2006, according to company, but grew 7.16% between the same two quarters in 2007.)
I think using market share as a sign of success is terribly misleading.
At the end of this year (the December quarter of 2009) Apple will likely have a worldwide OS share of less than 4%, while Microsoft will have nearly 90%.
Yet, if you run the numbers, Apple is likely to surpass Microsoft's earnings and profit.
Market share is a terrible indicator.