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Asia Pacific server shipments for the fourth quarter of 2007 expanded by 17.7 percent over the same quarter in the previous year, while revenue for the same period was up by 22 percent, according to Gartner. Server revenues totaled $2.24 billion forthe quarter, as server shipments reached 370,589 units. The healthy increase in shipments and revenue during in the fourth quarter concluded the full year 2007 with shipment growth of 11 percent and an 18 percent in revenue. Overall server shipments in 2007 totaled 1.37 million units and revenue reached $7.73 billion. The sub-regions in Asia Pacific showed positive year-on-year revenue growth during the fourth quarter with Greater China continuing to be the largest revenue contributor with 55 percent share of Asia Pacific revenue and a 22 percent increase over the same quarter last year. Fourth quarter shipments in China were 196,023 units, with overall server shipments for the year reaching 683,035 a 16.9 percent increase on the 587,837 servers shipped in 2006. Total server revenue reached RMB26.6 billion, up from RMB 22 billion in 2006. Meanwhile in Hong Kong, there were 10,981 servers shipped in Q4, 2007 bringing the yearly total to 42,422, an 11.99 percent on the 37,819 shipped in 2006. Revenue stood at HK$2.6 billion, compared to just under HK$2 billion in 2006. The top five vendors by revenue in China were: IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Sun Microsystems and Lenovo. In Hong Kong it was a similar picture with IBM leading the way, followed by Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Dell and Acer. According to Gartner, in both markets, IBM maintained a considerable revenue lead over its nearest competitor. "As we expected, the demand for x86 blade servers remained strong during the fourth quarter," says Erica Gadjuli, principal analyst, server markets at Gartner. "Stiffer price competition in tower and rack x86 servers, particularly the lower-end of one and two-socket servers, caused overall x86 revenue growth to expand faster than unit shipments, as happened in the first three quarters of 2007. Revenue from RISC-Itanium Unix servers continued its positive growth at 22.6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2007, fuelled by healthy demand in India and Greater China." "Of the top five vendors, HP continued to gain success in pushing its Itanium-based HP Integrity servers in Asia Pacific market space during the quarter, and IBM's System P showed steady performance." Based on shipments, Hewlett Packard (HP) maintained its number one position by growing 23.8 percent in the fourth quarter 2007, reaching 105 thousand units. IBM and Dell remained in their respective second and the third positions, recording 22 percent and 20 percent market share respectively. Amongst the top five vendors in volume business, Lenovo posted the strongest growth of 31.5 percent and ranked fourth during the fourth quarter. Lenovo's server shipments was less than 2000 units behind Sun Microsystems for the full year 2007, as Sun continued to exhibit slight slowdown in volume business during the fourth quarter. "Server virtualization and consolidation is driving demand for high configuration servers and we will see this trend continue in 2008," says Ms. Gadjuli. |
