Despite less than encouraging (or perhaps inaccurate news) news broken about Apple’s (AAPL) share of emerging smartphone markets via the Wall Street Journal earlier today, it appears that Apple has managed to score a big win in the contracting market of U. S. based PC sales. Apple Inc. has remained in third place for the fourth quarter of 2012, making it one of a select few manufacturers that has managed to see market share growth in an area with shrinking demand.
Alongside Apple Inc. in this report are HP at 12.6 percent and Lenovo at 9.7 percent beating out Apple’s growth of 5.4 percent. Acer, Dell and “others” are down 21.6 percent, 16.5 percent and 2 percent respectively to account for a total shrinkage of total U.S. PC markets by 2.1 percent.
Statistics to this effect were issued by the research firm Gartner as of Monday morning, and clearly show that Mac business is still growing year-over-year. Per reporting from MacRumors.com, Gartner does not usually cover Apple’s worldwide market share, so it does not rank among the top five vendors on a worldwide basis.
IDC’s latest report on contraction of the overall PC market shares much bleaker. Their stats show the PC market as down 6.4 percent overall. They note that Windows 8 has not managed to return rejuvenating results for the market as of yet—even though it may issue in a “new stage” of the computing industry. According to the firm’s analyst, David Daoud states that the reasons are due to high expectations set by other products they’ve seen.
“Consumers expected all sorts of cool PCs with tablet and touch capabilities. Instead, they mostly saw traditional PCs that feature a new OS (Windows 8) optimized for touch and tablet with applications and hardware that are not yet able to fully utilize these capabilities.”
So the issue many reviewers have noted remains, and is really quite simple. Unless Microsoft gets on marketing their product and creating apps to utilize capabilities, its place will easily be usurped by current and future iterations of the Android OS and Apple product.
IDC also notes that these results were not in the least surprising. General consumers are being diverted from PCs to tablets and other like devices. Commercial spending on PCs remains low due to ongoing economic constraints.
While these reports may not seem encouraging to investors who seek to exploit the emerging, worldwide tablet and smartphone markets at first—it actually may point to one very good sign. Apple Inc.’s branding strategy and devotion to customer satisfaction appear to give the Cuppertino firm a leg up on the competition in already saturated markets—dispelling the myth that the company’s role is merely to serve as a tech innovator. Apple will continue to thrive because people still continue to understand and appreciate the way Apple products are designed to operate.
It might also be one of many factors that display a much simpler premise: basing a stock’s NASDAQ value on the merit of an increase in parts ordered for production of units for holiday sales and then retracting the value on merit of that number’s decline after the holiday season may not the best way to determine future earnings potential. Sales are clear indicators that a company is doing well. It really seems like someone might be trying to drive down the price as low as possible before the much anticipated Jan. 23 earnings report.
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