Fuelled by a bearish feature in Barrons magazine which highlighted Compaq Computer Corp as vulnerable, there has been a flurry of worry that the personal computer market is heading for the buffers, but if a personal computer recession is coming, Compaq’s second quarter figures show that it hasn’t reached the Houston company yet (see page five): in fact, it is pretty clear that the personal computer market is soft on both sides of the water, but that there has been a flight to quality that has benefitted Compaq most of all – more than IBM because of doubts about the Micro Channel; if real recession bites, Compaq’s breakneck growth rate will inevitably slow, and the strong dollar clearly hurt foreign translations in the second quarter, where sales outside the US were 44% of the total against 46% in the first quarter and 39% for all of 1988; Dataquest figures covering the main European markets put Compaq number two behind IBM in personal computers for business with 10.2% of the market.
