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Acer loses 3rd spot to Dell in Q4 notebook shipments

Taiwanese PC vendor slips from third to fourth position in the last quarter of 2012 due to weak demand leading to rising inventory levels.
Written by Jamie Yap, Contributor

There were no Taiwanese PC manufacturers listed in the top three PC vendors for notebook shipments in the fourth quarter of 2012, after Acer lost its third-place position to Dell.

Citing Digitimes Research, Taiwan's Central News Agency (CNA) reported Sunday Acer notebook shipments fell by more than 15 percent annually that quarter due to rising inventory levels. Asustek Computer came in at fifth, behind Acer by 0.2 percentage points in terms of global market share, it noted.

Topping the global notebook vendor list in that fourth quarter were Hewlett-Packard (HP), Lenovo and Dell, respectively. Lenovo, for one, shipped a company-high of eight million notebooks but it was not enough to topple HP which had performed consistently over the last two quarters of last year, it stated.

Global notebook shipments reached 48.51 million units in the fourth quarter--an increase of 2.5 percent from the third quarter due to Windows 7 sales during the year-end, the report said. The growth was better than the estimated 0.7 percent increase, it added.

However, for the whole of 2012, global notebook shipments came up to 194 million, which was a drop of 4.5 percent from the year before, CNA noted.

Digitimes Research's top 5 notebook vendors paralleled a recent IDC report showing the top 5 PC vendors of 2012. IDC stated that HP was tops with 58.13 million units shipped globally last year, while Lenovo came in second with 52.45 million units and Dell third with 38.72 million units.

Acer and Asus were fourth- and fifth-placed with 33.49 million units and 24.13 million units, respectively.

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