Server market grew 2.1% in shipments, while revenue decreased 4.5% in 2013

In the fourth quarter of 2013, worldwide server shipments grew 3.2 percent year over year, while revenue declined 6.6 percent from the fourth quarter of 2012, according to Gartner, Inc. In all of 2013, worldwide server shipments grew 2.1 percent, and server revenue declined 4.5 percent.

“2013 presented some pronounced differences in various server market segments,” said Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner. “We’ve seen ongoing growth in Web-scale IT deployments, while the enterprise remained relatively constrained.”

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

In the fourth quarter of 2013, the regions with the highest growth rates in terms of unit shipments were Asia/Pacific (16.3 percent), Japan (7.5 percent) and North America (relatively flat at 0.01 percent). All regions declined in vendor revenue except Asia/Pacific, which grew by 0.6 percent year over year.

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HP led the worldwide server market in revenue terms in the fourth quarter of 2013 (see Table 1). The company ended the year with $3.8 billion in revenue for the fourth quarter, for a total share of 28.1 percent worldwide. This was up 6.0 percent compared with the same quarter in 2012.

Of the top five global vendors, only HP and Cisco showed growth for the quarter. IBM had the largest decline with a decrease of 28.9 percent.

In server shipments, HP remained the worldwide leader for the fourth quarter of 2013 (see Table 2) with a year-over-year shipment increase of 8.7 percent.

Of the top five vendors in server shipments worldwide, all but Dell and IBM had shipment increases for the period. Huawei exhibited the strongest year-over-year increase with growth of 187.9 percent.

The results for the quarter were centered around x86 server demand, which increased in shipments by 3.8 percent and revenue by 4.3 percent for the fourth quarter of 2013.

Full-Year 2013 Server Market Results

The year of 2013 demonstrated growth in shipments with an increase of 2.1 percent, but revenue declined 4.5 percent with varying geographic results. x86 servers continued to produce some growth as the predominant platform used for large-scale data center build-outs, particularly in North America. Emerging regions like Asia/Pacific and Latin America also added to the growth for the year.

x86 blade servers posted a revenue increase of 0.8 percent and a shipment decrease of 2.6 percent for the year. HP was the 2013 leader in x86 blade server shipments with 40.3 percent market share; Cisco was in second place with 15.9 percent of the market.

The outlook for 2014 suggests that modest growth will continue. These increases will continue to be buffered in the enterprise by the use of x86 server virtualisation to consolidate physical machines as they are replaced.