By Winston Chai
Tuesday, January 27 2004 03:57 PM
URL: http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/hardware/0,39042972,39166140,00.htm

Despite being hit by the SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) outbreak, the regional PC market managed to record a remarkable double-digit growth last year, says market analyst IDC.

According to preliminary findings from the company's latest report, Asia-Pacific PC shipments, excluding Japan (APEJ), totaled 28.4 million units in 2003, a 14 percent increase over the previous year.

"The APEJ PC market proved surprisingly resilient through 2003,” said Bryan Ma, IDC Asia-Pacific's senior research manager for personal systems. “Although SARS may have temporarily stunned the market earlier in the year, the market jumped back to its feet quickly in the second half and still managed to pull off an impressive year of growth."

Apart from Korea, which continues to be plagued by economic and political uncertainties, the firm said all Asian countries achieved positive growth last year.

The spike was especially evident in Thailand, where PC shipments grew by an astounding 50 percent. According to IDC, the Kingdom's PC boom was largely a result of the budget PC program launched last year by Thailand's Information, Communications and Technology ministry to increase computer literacy.

China also saw a bull run last year with total PC shipments of 13.3 million units, an 18 percent jump from 2002. Besides declining prices brought about by keen vendor competition, large-scale government and education projects gave the mainland's computer market a boost, IDC added.

In Australia and New Zealand, the PC markets were buoyed by favorable currency exchange rates, continued purchases from the countries' education sectors as well as corporate hardware replacement cycles.

Beyond country-specific factors, the company said Intel's successful Centrino marketing campaign and the falling prices of notebook computers also lifted the PC industry in Asia-Pacific.

2003 Asia-Pacific PC shipments by vendor
Company	2003 shipments	2002 shipments	year-on-year growth
Lenovo	3.59m	3.09m	16.4%
HP	2.76m	1.94m	42%
IBM	1.98m	1.57m	25.5%
Dell	1.80m	1.25m	43.6%
Founder	1.42m	1.03m	38.6%
Source: IDC Asia-Pacific, 2004

On the vendor front, Chinese computer giant Lenovo (formerly known as Legend) retained its position as Asia's leading PC seller with a market share of 12.7 percent. This is followed by Hewlett-Packard (HP), IBM, Dell and Founder Computer, China's second-largest PC maker.

HP and Dell failed to achieve top spot in market share but outshone rivals in terms of grow rate by shipping over 40 percent more PCs in 2003 compared with the previous year.

Ma highlighted that HP’s growth in 2003 "would have been lower" if IDC had included Compaq’s first quarter 2002 PC shipments in its calculation "Compaq’s shipments were excluded from our tabulation as they were still separate entities from HP then," he explained.

"Dell's definitely doing better and this is largely due to their focus on China. The Chinese government and educational sectors are big PC purchasers and Dell has managed to build relationships with some of the key authorities in China," he added.