By Sumathi V Selvaretnam
Server spending in the Asia Pacific market, excluding Japan, dipped by almost five percent last year, recording its first decline since the dot.com meltdown in 2001, revealed a new report by research firm IDC.
The company’s Asia Pacific Quarterly Enterprise Server Tracker results for the fourth quarter of 2008 also showed that server shipments in Asia Pacific, excluding Japan fell by 4.6 percent year-on-year after 25 consecutive quarters of strong growth since the second quarter of 2002.
Almost all countries in the Asia Pacific region faced a double-digit decline in server spending with the exception of China, Thailand and Vietnam that faced smaller single digit declines.
"It was an absolutely nerve wrecking quarter when 6 of the top 7 markets witnessed almost a third of server spending plunge on a year-on-year basis," said Rajnish Arora, Director of Asia/Pacific Enterprise Servers & Workstations Research at IDC. "The modest, single-digit decline in server spending in second-half 2008 in the PRC was expected after an astounding 30 percent surge in second-half 2007 underpinned by massive infrastructure buildout in the run up to the Olympics."
Hong Kong took the biggest hit with a 52 percent decline in server spending in the fourth quarter of 2008. Arora said that this was because the city’s large concentration of global and regional financial services bore the brunt of the economic meltdown.
In the Singapore server market, shipments during the same period plunged 19.6 percent year-on-year after two consecutive quarters of healthy double-digit increases since the second quarter of 2008.
“Spending on non-x86 servers, which are typically used for running mission critical core-business applications, sharply decelerated to 34 percent decline in the fourth quarter 2008 compared with 23.1 percent drop in third quarter 2008,” said Arora.
IDC said that x86 server spending declined 4.3 percent for the full year 2008 after growing for the past six consecutive years.
IBM gained top spot among vendors, capturing a 37 percent revenue share of the Asia Pacific (excluding Japan) server market last year.
HP took second place with a market share of 32.2 percent. It also emerged as the biggest vendor in terms of unit shipments last year, propelled by its strength in the x86 servers.
While Sun gained third spot with a market share of 10.6 percent, its year-on-year growth declined by 17.2 percent due to a business slowdown in its Unix server segment.
Dell was the identified as the fastest grower with units shipments increasing by 14.8 percent in 2008.
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