Double digit growth for Asia Pacific server market in 3Q

The Asia Pacific server market continued its double digit growth in the third quarter of 2011, with year-on-year shipment growth of 23.9 per cent and revenue up 18.5 per cent compared to the same quarter last year, according to Gartner, Inc.

“Asia Pacific remained the strongest region for server shipment growth during the third quarter of 2011,” said Gartner principle analyst Erica Gadjuli. “Greater China (China, Hong Kong and Taiwan in combined) ruled 69.7 per cent of the region’s total market, up 2 points from the same quarter last year.”

Server shipments in other major markets in Asia Pacific experienced double digit growth year on year: 20 per cent in Australia, 14 per cent in South Korea and 18 per cent in Singapore. Meanwhile vendor revenue rose moderately from the same quarter last year with 6 per cent growth each in Australia and Singapore and 2 per cent in South Korea.

Asia Pacific as a region recorded the fastest year-on-year growth in the x86 server platform during the quarter, up 29 per cent in revenue and 25 per cent in shipments. Besides the virtualisation implementation on x86 servers that forged ahead in this region, demand from internet companies continued to be part of the main driver for server growth, especially in China. Revenue from RISC/Itanium Unix servers increased 11 per cent from the same quarter of 2010, fostered by core infrastructure build out predominantly in the financial and telecommunication sectors.

Despite a modest increase of 8 per cent in unit shipments, blades saw more rapid growth in revenue (14.5 per cent) compared to the same quarter of 2010. For the period, rack optimised servers climbed the fastest with 32 per cent in shipment and 22 per cent in revenue.

Tables 1 and 2 show the top five vendors in Asia Pacific server market for the quarter. HP remains the leader in shipments with 25 per cent of the total market and IBM led by revenue with 42 per cent share. Lenovo more than doubled its revenue from the same quarter of 2010, as shown in Table 1, driven mainly by its aggressive move in China across all major verticals. Similarly, Dell was second in-line in witnessing a robust year on year growth in the third quarter, owing its success mostly to Internet companies buying its DCS offerings.