Better than expected
With the consumer portable segment so important and its main growth area being netbooks, it's no surprise that those vendors with the strongest netbook offering fared best.
Previous number one UK vendor HP had a nightmare quarter in terms of sales volume with a year-on-year fall of 25.5 percent, thus surrendering the number one spot to Dell, which only declined by 7.3 percent. The big winner, however, was Acer, which grew by 36.7 percent in Q2 to take second place. How long before it's number one?
"It's a really interesting time as things change from quarter to quarter," said Morvay. "Dell had a good quarter in consumer portables, but HP had a bad one. A third of all sold in the UK were mini-notebooks and HP has made a conscious choice not to push hard there. Going indirect with companies like DSG1 and Vodafone has really helped Dell."
The award for year-on-year growth doesn't go to Acer, however, with Samsung doing an even better job of exploiting the netbook market, especially through the telco channel. Samsung's consumer portable sales volume increased by a mind-boggling 535.8 percent on the same period a year ago, elevating it to fifth place overall in the UK market.
With low priced consumer portables providing all the growth in the UK market right now, the quarterly picture can change dramatically depending on product launches and price promotions. While Acer and Samsung are to be commended for their gains, they will have come at the cost of margins in this ultra price-sensitive market.
So perhaps this isn't such a disastrous quarter for HP, and it has decided to let its competitors fight over the bottom end of the market, while it focuses on the higher margin segments.
