Gartner puts Apple at 8.8%, IDC at 9.4%. This bodes well for next week's earnings report

Source: MacRumors.com

Apple (AAPL) computers sold surprisingly well in a shaky economy last quarter, according to a pair of preliminary reports issued Wednesday by Gartner and IDC.

The big winner this summer was Acer, which became the world's undisputed No. 2 computer maker, after Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), on the strength of netbooks that sell for under $400.

But Mac sales also grew, despite an average selling price of just over $1,200 and profit margins that are the envy of the industry.

Reporting only domestic sales, Gartner estimates that Apple shipped 1.572 million Macs in the United States last quarter, up 6.8% year to year, for an 8.8% market share.

IDC's numbers were slightly higher: 1.64 million Macs, up 11.8%, 9.4% market share.

These seem to be record numbers. Twelve months ago, Gartner put Apple's U.S. market share at 9.5% and IDC had it at 9.1%, but those were preliminary reports. Both firms revised their 2008 Q3 Mac numbers sharply downward and now say Apple's share of the U.S. market last year was actually 8.6%.

Neither Gartner nor IDC reports Apple's worldwide Mac sales. For that we'll have to wait until Monday, Oct. 19, when Apple issues its quarterly earnings report. Analysts we surveyed put total Mac sales anywhere between 2.6 million and 2.9 million, with a consensus of 2.76 million.

UPDATE: Reader SMR in Nashua, N.H., points out that if you go back far enough, you can find years in which Apple enjoyed a larger share of the U.S. PC market. In 1994, for example, it was No. 2 (after Packard Bell) with a 14.7% share. In 1981, it had 17%, which put it in the No. 2 spot after Radio Shack (20%). Source: Ken Paulson's Chronology of Apple Computer Personal Computers.

Below the fold: Gartner and IDC's current U.S. and worldwide PC numbers:

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Daniel Eran Dilger finds anti-Apple bias in Gartner's research

"Looking into its crystal ball, Gartner Group has predicted that Google’s Android will become the second largest smartphone platform by 2012," writes Daniel Eran Dilger in the one-man blog he grandly calls Roughly Drafted Magazine. "Problem is, nobody’s talking about how terrible Gartner is at predicting things, or that Gartner’s 'research' has historically been paid for by special interests."

So begins Dilger's reaction to an interview with Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney that appeared Tuesday in Computerworld and was picked up uncritically by more than half a dozen tech websites.

Drawing on historical records and making generous use of internal Microsoft documents made public during antitrust proceedings, Dilger attacks not only Dulaney's numbers, but the credibility of the entire Gartner research group.

The result is a 1,700-word screed that may be the most thorough take-down of a tech industry analyst — and his employer — since Eliot Spitzer went after Henry Blodget.

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It's numbers like these that make you wonder what exactly Gartner and IDC are measuring.

In competing reports issued Wednesday afternoon, the two leading PC market research firms reported domestic Mac shipments for the second quarter of 2009 that differed by more than 200,000 units.

Gartner reported Apple (AAPL) shipping 1.422 million Macs in the U.S., a 2.5% increase over Q2 2008 in a quarter that saw overall PC shipments in the U.S. decline 1.2%.

IDC had Apple shipping 1.213 million Macs in the same quarter, a 12.4% year-to-year decline that was far worse than the industry average -3% and dropped Apple into fifth place the U.S market, after Dell (DELL), HP (HPQ), Acer and Toshiba.

According to Gartner, Apple has an 8.7% share of the U.S. market. According to IDC, that share is 7.6%.

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On Wednesday, Gartner Research reported that Apple's (AAPL) share of the U.S. computer market, which topped 9% in calendar Q3 last year, dropped to 7.4% in Q1 2009 — putting it in fourth place behind HP (HPQ), Dell (DELL) and Acer.

The next day, Apple's share price rose nearly 2% to finish Thursday at $121.45, its highest close in six months.

Why the disconnect? Chalk it up to the ASPs.

As Gartner's Mikako Kitagawa notes, sales for Apple's competitors are being driven by the explosion of interest in low-cost netbooks — not just among penny-pinching consumers, but in the professional and education markets as well.

As result, Gartner estimates that average selling prices (ASPs) for computers sold in the first quarter may have fallen as much as 20% across the board — cutting sharply into PC makers' revenues.

Except at Apple. Despite rumors that its engineers may be working on some kind of device with a 10-inch screen, the company has so far shown zero interest in duking it out with the likes of Acer and Asus in the bargain basement mini-notebook market.

So even as Apple's market share shrinks, its margins and gross revenue are likely to have held up better than any of its competitors.

Moreover, while Gartner's Ms. Kitagawa is seeing signs of channel inventory restocking at other companies — evidence that the global PC market has not yet hit bottom — she singles out Apple's "deft control of inventories [which] limited its shipment decline."

All this — and a flood of deferred iPhone earnings — may help explain why analysts are scrambling to raise their Apple price targets (and talking up the stock) in advance of the company's fiscal Q2 earnings report next Wednesday, April 22.

Below the fold: Gartner's preliminary estimates of domestic PC shipments for Q1 2009.

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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.

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We've known since October, when Apple released its latest earnings report, that the iPhone had a bang-out summer – shipping nearly 7 million units in the quarter, up from just over 1.1 million the year before.

But it wasn't until Thursday, when Gartner Research issued its smartphone sales report for the third quarter of 2008, that we learned just how well the iPhone did vis-a-vis its competitors.

Apple's (AAPL) share of the worldwide smartphone market leaped 327.5% in Gartner's survey, catapulting past Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows Mobile to grab the No. 3 position and putting it within striking distance of Research in Motion's (RIMM) BlackBerry for the No. 2 spot.

Smartphones running on Nokia's (NOK) Symbian operating system are still No. 1, with nearly 50% market share, but they lost ground as Symbian sales shrank for the first time, down 12% for the quarter.

Apple's results would have been even more impressive – and would have knocked RIM off the No. 2 perch, as Steve Jobs claims -  if Gartner's researchers hadn't reduced the iPhone's quarterly sales numbers by the more than 2 million units that Apple shipped before the end of the quarter but were still sitting in inventory.

Gartner's preliminary sales figures – listed both by vendor and by operating system – are available in its press release here.  But they are easier to visualize in the bar graphs, pasted below the fold, that Ars Technica's David Chartier has helpfully produced. See here. More

Almost lost in the noise of the Presidential debates, the collapse of the Dow and the milling of those new MacBook aluminum unibodies were the preliminary reports from Gartner and IDC this week that showed sharp gains for Apple (AAPL) in third-quarter domestic computer shipments.

Apple's unit shipments year-over-year grew 32% according to IDC, and 29.4% according to Gartner — more than six times the industry average.

As Gartner measures it, Apple's market share hit a record 9.5% in calendar Q3, up from 7.7% in the same quarter a year ago.

IDC's numbers show even steeper gains: it puts Apple's Q3 market share at 9.1%, up from 7.3% in 2007.

It's almost as if Apple were in a different business than Dell (DELL), HP (HPQ), Acer and Toshiba. While the average selling price of PCs continued to drop this summer — thanks, as Gartner notes, to the growing popularity of under-$500 "netbooks" — Apple kept its prices high as it added memory, power and stylish features.

Exactly how profitable calendar Q3 (Apple's fiscal Q4) was for the company we'll find out at the close of market next Tuesday, when Apple issues its quarterly and annual earnings reports.

Below: the raw data from Gartner and IDC. Note that neither company reports Apple's worldwide sales numbers.

[Gartner chart courtesy of AppleInsider.]

[IDC chart courtest of Electronista.]

Dueling reports Wednesday from the two leading PC survey firms — Gartner and IDC — confirm what the crowds at the Apple (AAPL) stores have been telling us: The Mac had a great second quarter.

According to Gartner, Mac sales grew 38% year-over-year to edge out Acer/Gateway/PackardBell for the No. 3 spot in the United States after Dell (DELL) and HP (HPQ). IDC recorded slightly slower growth (31.7%) and has Apple still trailing Acer by 2,000 units — not a statistically significant figure in a quarter in which Apple shipped an estimated 2.37 million Macs worldwide.

Gartner puts Apple's U.S. market share at 8.5%, up from 6.4% a year ago; IDC has it at 7.8%, up from 6.2%. Both reports are preliminary.

Apple still doesn't make the top 5 in either company's list of top PC vendors worldwide, although IDC's Loren Loverde says it came in No. 6. (link)

It's worth noting that while its competitors were cutting prices to boost sales in a tight domestic economy, Apple managed to grow faster while maintaining profit margins that are the envy of the industry.

And if you count iPhones and iPod touches as computers, says 9to5 Mac's Seth Weintraub, "you get a whole new ball game."

Below the fold: the charts from both reports. More

Acer, the Taiwanese computer manufacturer that acquired Gateway Inc. last year, has as a result overtaken Apple (AAPL) in both U.S. and worldwide computer sales, according to preliminary reports issued Wednesday by Gartner and IDC.

Although the two market research firms show Apple's domestic computer sales in the Christmas quarter up roughly 30 percent from last year — outpacing the industry average by better than 3 to 1 — Apple's share of the market actually fell during those three months. According to Gartner, the Mac now has 6.1 percent of the U.S. market; according to IDC it's 5.7 percent. That puts Apple in 4th place behind Dell (DELL), HP (HPQ) and Acer in U.S. personal computer sales.

In October, Gartner and IDC estimated Apple's 3Q share of the U.S. market to be considerably higher: 8.1 percent and 6.3 percent, respectively. See here.

In worldwide PC sales, Apple doesn't make the top five in either research firm's report.

These results would seem to contradict analysts' predictions of blowout Christmas sales for Apple. Earlier this week Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster estimated that 2.3 million Macs may have shipped worldwide in the quarter, representing year-to-year growth of 43 percent.

Gartner's and IDC's results are preliminary and could change when the manufacturers release their sales figures. Apple is scheduled to announce it's quarterly results next Tuesday.

Below the fold: Gartner and IDC charts of U.S. computer sales.

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Dueling reports from Gartner and IDC show Apple (AAPL) grabbing a larger slice of domestic computer market in the third quarter of 2007, although the reports disagree about just how large that slice is.

Gartner has Apple's market share climbing to 8.1%, up from 6.2% a year earlier.

IDC also shows strong growth for the company, but by its calculations, Apple now commands a 6.3% market share, up from 5.7% last summer.

Their findings are summarized in the charts below.