Fourth Quarter PC Sales Hit New Record

Reports of the PC's pending demise may be a little premature, according to the findings of the latest PC sales report from tracking firm IHS iSuppli.

In fact, sales of new PCs hit a new high last quarter.

In the fourth quarter of 2010, sales of PCs, including desktops, notebooks and netbooks, topped 93 million units, up from 88.9 million in the same quarter of 2009, according to iSuppi.

For all of 2010, PC makers sold 345.4 million units, up from 302.4 million in 2009. That's a gain of 14.2 percent year over year.

Among the major players, Dell surged back into second place during the quarter behind HP, after fighting its way back ahead of Acer, which had held the second-place position since the third quarter of 2009.

Acer was deposed partly thanks to the popularity of so-called "media tablets" like the iPad, which have been displacing sales of netbooks, iSuppli said. However, the shift also was driven by solid corporate PC purchases, many of them desktops.

"Acer ... had surged to the No. 2 spot on the strength of its strong sales of netbook PCs to consumers and a generally buoyant consumer market. However, with momentum for consumer PCs waning and in light of growing competition from media tablets, Acer's gains have been reversed," Matthew Wilkins, principal analyst for compute platforms at IHS, said in a statement.

Dell also benefited from continuing demand for desktop computers due to corporate refresh rates.

"The corporate PC segment continues to outperform the consumer market as companies replace systems with newer, faster, more efficient computers," Wilkins said.

No other competitor came close to HP, though, which shipped 18 million computers in the fourth quarter. It finished the year with almost 20 percent of all PC shipments globally. Dell checked in at 12.1 percent with sales of 11.3 million units, followed by Acer, which held a 10.2 percent share of the market with 9.5 million PCs.

Acer finished in a dead heat with Lenovo, which also held 10.2 percent share and shipped 9.5 million units.

Toshiba, meanwhile, shipped 5.4 million PCs, and garnered 5.8 percent share.

All in all, the signs look positive, at least for the time being.

"The worldwide PC business took another step toward becoming a market generating 100 million units per quarter ... with the market coming back strong amid growth in the mid-teens, the PC industry will look back on 2010 as a year that exceeded expectations," Wilkins said.

Stuart J. Johnston is a contributing editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @stuartj1000.