Acer conquers HP in Europe, Apple breaks into top Five

In a declining European market, Acer has overtaken HP to become Western Europe's no. 1 PC supplier, in units, while Apple has made the UK top five.

The PC market of Western European declined in the second quarter – almost by 3.3%, according to the latest reports from Gartner. Acer’s unit sales increased by 24.3% to 3.2m units as Hewlett-Packard grew sales by only 1.4% to 3.0m units, which made Acer dethrone HP as the biggest PC seller in this part of Europe. This was mainly the result of Acer shifting almost half the netbooks sold in Europe.

Although the professional PC market plunged by 21%, hitting companies that sell a lot of business machines such as HP, Dell, Lenovo and Fujitsu. The consumer PC market grew by 21%, benefiting companies such as Acer, Apple, HP and Samsung, in particular those with more consumer-oriented products, and netbooks in particular.

Ranjit Atwal, principal analyst at Gartner, tells the Guardian,” Without mini-notebooks, the market would have declined more than 15%, but given the new routes to market and price points of these PCs, they have managed to prevent a more severe decline." Atwal has an opinion about Asus, whose shipments tumbled by 15%, which says that the company's sales in Western Europe are dependent on the distribution.

In related news, Samsung grew its second quarter shipments by 250% in Western Europe. It has leveraged the connections with telcos to push the netbooks into the PC market.

On the other hand, Dell held on to the top spot with 606,000 shipments in the UK, although down by 6%. None other than Apple broke into the top 5, which looks like - Acer (536,000, up 32.6%), HP (431,000, down 25.1%), Toshiba (208,000, down 14.7%) and Apple (136,000, up 14.7%). Overall, the market declined by 6.5%, in units. Although Apple does not have a netbook, the success of the iPhone, iPod, and iTunes has helped made sure it sells enough Macs to stay in the hunt.

It's noticeable that Lenovo no longer appears in any of the major tables. The chief reason is that to cushion the decline in large corporations cutting back on PC purchases, its consumer section has not grown equally.