Recession may be burying the major continental economies, with the likelihood that things will get much worse before they start to get better, but the European personal computer market continued to prosper in the first quarter, the Wall Street Journal reports. According to the quarterly Wall Street Journal Europe-Dataquest Europe Ltd report on the market, sales of personal computers rose 19.4% to 2.5m machines, just shy of the 20.8% rise in the fourth quarter of 1992 – but volume ain’t all, and the price war meant that total industry revenue slipped 3.3% to $5,100m. As might be expected, the biggest winner was Compaq Computer Corp, which nearly doubled its share of shipments to 10.7% from 5.6% a year earlier, and increased its share of industry revenue to 13.7% from 8.9%. IBM Corp, Dell Computer Corp and Siemens-Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG also gained market share, but Apple Computer Inc and Commodore International Ltd were losers in the share stakes. The top 10 companies tool 60.5% of the market, up from 50.7% a year ago. For the rest of the year, Dataquest counts on recession to put a damper on growth, and it forecasts that shipment growth rates will slow to an average 13% to 14% for the full year, while total revenue increases very slightly. Eric Cador, marketing center director for Hewlett-Packard Co’s personal computer division in Grenoble, France is a contrarian and expects his own company to ship 2.4 to 2.5 times as many Vectras in Europe in the current quarter as it did a year earlier and he forecasts that revenue will double from the year-ago level. Machines using the 80486SX accounted for 26% of the total, and saw dramatic price reductions over the 12 months – 60.3% in France to $2,446, 67.8% in Germany to $2,567, and 49.2% here in the UK to $2,421. The figures are Dataquest estimates of what a buyer actually pays after standard retail discounts, as opposed to list prices.Prices are now seen to be about 10% higher in Europe than in the US, against 25% a year ago. In smaller markets, the number shipped in Sweden was 82,910 in the quarter, up 41.8%, but in Spain, where the dead hand of the European Monetary System is wreaking havoc, ships rose only 9.7% to 143,380.
