Gartner report reveals growth in shipments for Apple, Toshiba in the last quarter of 2010

Information Technology research and advisory firm headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, Gartner Inc. in its recent reports has revealed interesting facts pertaining to the number of notebooks shipped by major companies that feature in the top 5 league. Topping the charts were Apple and Toshiba, which shipped more notebooks in the fourth quarter of 2010 than last year. As for the remaining three of the top companies, i.e. HP, Dell, and Acer, the picture was pretty grim with all of these suffering year-over-year declines in the numbers of units shipped.

However HP is number one in total units shipped for the quarter at a total of 5.6 million units. That figure happens to be lower from the 5.9 million PCs the company moved in the same quarter last year, thus registering a substantial 6% drop. Dell took away the number two spot in total overall shipments, registering a drop of 6.1% from last year, and Acer’s sales plummeted a serious 30%. In contrast, Apple witnessed an impressive 23.7% growth, ahead of Toshiba’s 14.4% improvement in units shipped for the largest year-over-year growth in the metric.
 

The reason for this decline in sales inspite of the Christmas holiday season has been attributed by Gartner to the growing popularity of the iPad and other tablet devices amongst other causes such as, general shoppers’ fatigue. Gartner Inc. in its report also mentioned that heightening sales in the professional notebook markets has in fact enabled manufactures to ward off the effects of slackening consumer enthusiasm.

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