European and Australian Server Markets Collapse in Q1

Published: June 15, 2009

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The global server sales and shipment statistics from IDC and Gartner that we reported on in the past two issues of The Four Hundred show just how bad the impact of the economic meltdown has been on server makers. Subsequent data released by these two companies shows that if the global server market was awful in Q1, then it was terrible in Europe and downright shocking in Australia.

To recap the server picture on a global basis: Gartner says that server sales fell by 24 percent to $10.1 billion, and shipments fell by 24.2 percent to 1.72 million boxes, while IDC (which only measures factory revenues and shipments out of vendors) reckons that factory revenues for servers fell by 24.5 percent to $9.9 billion and shipments fell by 26.5 percent to just under 1.5 million units. Both companies agree on one thing: this was the worst quarter for server global shipment and revenue declines in history.

According to Gartner, server sales in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa swooned by 34.2 percent to just over $3 billion, and shipments in the region fell by 29 percent to 507,177 units. All of the server makers did terribly in EMEA, and Fujitsu, which was in the process of taking over the Siemens half of the Fujitsu-Siemens partnership, did the worst, oddly enough, with revenues dropping 46.3 percent to $199.8 million. (Some of this has to do with currency translation from euros and pounds to dollars.) Hewlett-Packard's sales in the EMEA region declined by 33.1 percent to $1.08 billion, meaning that it still held onto the top spot in EMEA. IBM pushed $876.2 billion in iron in Q1, down 32.4 percent, followed by Sun Microsystems, which is still ahead of Dell in EMEA despite its many woes, with sales of $341.9 million, down 36.4 percent. Dell came in number four, well ahead of Fujitsu, with $290.1 million in sales, down 37.9 percent.

Down under in Australia, IDC calculates that overall server sales fell by 38.8 percent in Q1, with shipments down 38.9 percent. Down under, indeed. IDC did not provide revenue and shipment figures for the Australian market, but added that sales of X64 servers fell by a shocking 46.4 percent against shipment declines of 38 percent. Sales of other platforms in Australia--including Itanium, Power, Sparc, mainframe, and other platforms--fell by only 26.6 percent, which is a bit like a party compared to the X64 revenue declines.

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