Worldwide server shipment rises 3.2% in Q4

Worldwide server shipment has increased 3.2% while revenue has dropped by 6.6% during the forth quarter of 2013, according to a report from Gartner.

For the complete year 2013, worldwide server shipments have gone up by 2.1% while server revenue decreased by 4.5%.

Gartner research vice president Jeffrey Hewitt said 2013 presented some pronounced differences in various server market segments.

"We’ve seen ongoing growth in Web-scale IT deployments, while the enterprise remained relatively constrained," Hewitt added.

"In terms of hardware platform types, mainframe and RISC/Itanium Unix platform market performance kept overall revenue growth in check."

During the quarter, Asia/Pacific led the market with highest regional growth of 16.3% followed by Japan with 7.5% and North America with 0.01% increase in shipments.

HP led the worldwide server market in terms of shipments and revenue, wherein it experienced a 8.7% and 6% increase respectively for the fourth quarter of 2013, while it reported a revenue of $3.8bn for the period.

For the fourth quarter of 2013, HP, Dell, IBM, Huawei and Fujitsu remained top five vendors in server shipments worldwide with Huawei experiencing highest year-over-year increase of 187.9%.

In Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region, the revenue reached $3.6bn for the quarter recording a 6.4% decline, while the shipments reached 613,000 units, a 2.5% decrease against same period of the previous year.

For the complete year 2013, the server shipments decreased 5.6% to 2.3 million units, whereas the server revenue dropped by 6.3% to total $12.4bn.

Gartner research director Adrian O’Connell said the EMEA server market continued to suffer as it recorded its 10th consecutive quarterly revenue decline.

"Economic weakness continued to have a profound effect on the EMEA server market," O’Connell added.

"The EMEA server market ended the year on a particularly low point.

"Vendors that sell low-end servers should see a more positive 2014, but those exposed to the high-end segments will continue to face tough challenges."