Worldwide computer shipments grew more than 13% in 2007, in a bit of good news for local chip and computer products makers.
About 271 million PCs were shipped to stores and consumers, led by sales in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, according to data from Stamford, Conn.-based market researcher Gartner Inc.
“2007 showed a clear indication of the worldwide PC market landscape,strong growth in emerging regions and slower growth in markets such as the U.S.,” said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst for Gartner’s client computing markets group.
Hewlett-Packard Co. broke its tie with No. 2 Dell Inc. and held the top spot as the biggest seller of PCs in 2007.
The Palo Alto-based company shipped 49 million PCs and widened its market share to 18% in 2007, up from 16% in 2006, the data showed.
“HP established a solid No. 1 position in 2007,” Kitagawa said. “Robust consumer and mobile PC sales across all regions were two main drivers of HP’s overall growth.”
Local HP suppliers include Newport Beach’s Conexant Systems Inc. and Lake Forest’s Western Digital Corp.
Dell lost a bit of its foothold to HP with 14% market share in 2007, down from 16% in 2006. Dell shipped about 39 million PCs.
Local HP suppliers include Aliso Viejo’s QLogic Corp., Conexant and Western Digital.
No. 3 Taiwan’s Acer Inc., now the parent company of Irvine’s Gateway Inc., upped its share to 9%, an increase from 8% in 2006. Acer shipped about 24 million PCs in 2007.
The Gateway buy, which closed in October, gave a boost, Kitagawa said.
“Acer’s acquisition of Gateway’s consumer business boosted the shipment volume toward the end of the year,” she said.
No. 4 China’s Lenovo Group Ltd., which has said it’s aggressively looking to break into the top three, had 7.4% market share, up slightly from a year earlier. The company shipped roughly 20 million PCs.
No. 5 Japan’s Toshiba Corp., with its U.S. headquarters in Irvine, shipped 11 million PCs last year, growing its share to 4%, up from 3.8% in 2006.
The balance of worldwide PC shipments was made up by Apple Inc. and others, which accounted for 128 million computers and about 47% of the market.
U.S. consumers opted to buy more laptops than desktops last year, the report showed.
The fourth quarter marked the second consecutive quarter that laptop sales surpassed desktops in the U.S.
The U.S. PC market grew more than 5% in 2007 with shipments totaling 64 million.
Solarflare Eyes More Demand
Chief Technology Officers George Zimmerman and Steve Pope of Irvine chip startup Solarflare Communications Inc. say they’re expecting to see more companies adopt faster data connections this year.
Privately held Solarflare, one of the county’s best-funded startups, makes chips for switches that direct the flow of data on a network.
The company’s chips allow faster networks to link with slower ones and to work with older copper wire networks.
The chips are designed to make smaller-capacity networks interact with heftier ones at data transfer speeds of about 10 gigabits per second, much faster than the standard 2 to 4 gigabits per second. That allows businesses to upgrade, rather than replace, networks.
The Business Journal pegged Solarflare as its tech company to watch in 2008.
Zimmerman and Pope say the market’s ripe for the widespread adoption of the 10 gigabit per second transfer speed in data centers.
“2008 will see tremendous demand for virtualization and convergence,” Pope said. “Enterprises and data centers can now easily and cost-effectively upgrade their network infrastructure to 10 gigabit and support these advanced applications.”
Other reasons for increased demand include, according to Solarflare:
– Increasing costs of power and cooling and the push for energy efficiency.
– The growing number of software applications, users and transactions to store.
– The rise of virtualization technology, which “virtually” combines many different servers in a network so that they appear as one.
Google Recruit
Irvine’s WebVisible Inc., an online advertising search company for small businesses, hired a former Google Inc. software engineer as vice president of engineering.
James Williams is set to head WebVisible’s efforts to develop “Geneva,” its proprietary advertising software.
At Google, Williams developed similar programs for the search kingpin.
Prior to Google, he was the founder of two companies: Los Angeles-based Fluid Audio Networks Inc., a networking site for music fans and musicians, and iKennect, where Williams developed a wireless Internet access portal for the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Resort in Las Vegas.
After landing the job at WebVisible, Williams wrote on his blog:
“While Google might represent the happiest place on earth relative to software development, my passion has always been building technology companies. The process of amassing a team from the ground up and taking a company to that next logic step and beyond is rewarding. (WebVisible) made an offer I couldn’t resist and their philosophy on balancing family and work is outstanding.”
WebVisible, which has 44 workers, was dubbed “emerging software company of the year” in 2007 by the Technology Council of Southern California, a trade group based in Torrance.
