Acer is leading the charge in the PC market, growing 21% last year, and taking the No.2 slot from Dell in Q4.
Compare PC market share for 2009:
$bn
HP 59.6
Dell 38.9
Acer 38.5
Lenovo 24.8
Toshiba 15.4
With PC market share for Q4 2009:
$bn
HP 17.2
Acer 11.8
Dell 10.8
Lenovo 7.9
Toshiba 4.7
Acer shipped 38.5 million PCs in 2009 for revenues of 38.9 billion. Notebooks accounted for nearly 80% of Acer's shipments in 2009. Just before Christmas I bought an ex-demo Acer notebook for £217 from Comet, and a nice thing it is with a battery life of over 6 hours.
Acer had a 28% increase in shipments of notebook PCs for the year, compared to a 20% rise for the overall market.
Dell's revenues slipped 9.9% last year shipping 38.96 million units compared to in 43.3 million units in 2008. For the whole year, Dell was still No.2 but only just - with a 0.2% lead over Acer.
Dell's desktop sales fell faster than market and its notebook sales grew slower than the market. Dell's share of the global PC market has fallen from 17.1% in 2005 to 12.9% in 2009.
I think Acer achieved the unusual thing of finding a new market and capitalising on it. I have a powerful desktop and a HP top end laptop but the Acer notebook hit the "I need one of those" spot that for me smartphones have totally failed to. It's small, incredibly light, runs proper Windows and with 3G and Wi-Fi connects seamlessly to networks with no dongles hanging off the side. I've even disabled the close down switch mechanism and left an FPGA synthesis running whilst I travelled across London by tube.
Only bad thing on it is the mousepad which is poor so I had to buy a small mouse for it.
And looking at the HP and Dell attempts to compete with Acer on these I'm afraid it was 2/10 - must try harder. If they don't they are in the s*** !
In that case mine was a lucky purchase, Mike, because I just asked the Comet guy what was the best deal on netbooks. But I agree with everything you say, it's an exceptionally nice little tool.