China leads APAC server shipment, revenue growth

China was the only market in the Asia-Pacific region to see positive growth in both server shipment and revenue during the fourth quarter of 2011, but the region remained the world's fastest growing server market.

In a statement Wednesday, research firm Gartner reported that server revenue in China grew 17 percent year-on-year in the fourth quarter of 2011, while server shipments increased 27 percent compared to the same period last year.

The Chinese market saw shipment and revenue growth that surpassed the Asia-Pacific average. Server shipments across the region grew 15.7 percent year-on-year in the fourth quarter of 2011, while revenue increased 2.4 percent from the same quarter last year, said the report.

Gartner principal analyst, Erica Gadjuli, said: "Asia-Pacific was the fastest growing region for server shipments during the fourth quarter of 2011, with China as the main growth engine, supported by the continued momentum of datacenter buildout.

"Most major economies in Asia-Pacific performed better than the rest of the world, which encouraged IT spending during 2011," she added.

According to the research firm, server shipment in Hong Kong increased 34 percent year-on-year in the fourth quarter but revenue dropped 6 percent. Korea saw a 16 percent year-on-year growth in shipment but dip in revenue by 9 percent due to the lack of contribution from other server platforms such as mainframe, RISC and Itanium-based servers, Gartner said. Server shipment in Malaysia grew 7.6 percent year-on-year while revenue 6 percent, it added.

Other Asia-Pacific markets saw a decline in both shipment and revenue. In Taiwan, shipments declined 4 percent while revenue dropped 5 percent year-over-year. Singapore, which was noted as one of the region's mature markets, saw a 6 percent year-on-year drop in server shipment and 7 percent decline in revenue.

x86 dominates market
According to Gartner, the region's x86 server market saw continued positive sales despite a shortage in hard-disk drive inventory due to the Thailand floods in October 2011.

Accounting for 98 percent of overall server shipments, the x86-based servers contributed 67 percent of server revenue in the fourth quarter. Revenue from x86 servers grew 18 percent year-over-year while shipment was also up by 17 percent.

"The strength of this segment was driven by enterprise buying preferences favoring richer configurations of rack optimized and blade servers," Gartner said.

In comparison, revenues for the mainframe platform and RISC/IA64 Unix servers declined 56 percent and 5 percent, respectively, despite the positive growth in the past three quarters of 2011. Gartner also noted a weakness globally in RISC/Itanium Unix server shipments.