Dell continues comeback in Q3 2010, Asus enters top five

Despite the slowdown in consumer sales, the PC market is continuing to slowly grow in the third quarter of 2010, according to market research firm iSuppli. Worldwide shipments were at 88.1 million units in Q3 2010, up 6.7 percent from Q2 2010, and up 10.3 percent from Q3 2009. Corporate PC demand in the third quarter was particularly evident: desktop PC shipment sales rose sequentially by 11 percent in the third quarter, compared to only a 4.2 percent increase for notebooks. iSuppli's definition of PCs encompasses desktops, notebooks and entry-level servers.

In the top five, Dell, Lenovo, and Asus saw solid growth while HP and Acer dipped. After reclaiming second place in the global PC market in Q2 2010 (which it had lost to Acer nine months earlier), Dell has not only maintained its ranking but has managed to capitalize on the corporate PC market refresh cycle. Lenovo delivered another impressive quarter; during every 2010 quarter, the company has so far achieved year-over shipment growth in excess of 30 percent. Asus managed to move into the top five ranking, displacing Toshiba into sixth place.

"The second quarter of 2009 was a terrible period for the PC market, but the following three months marked the beginning of the recovery, representing the first quarterly period in 2009 when shipments grew on both a sequential and year-over basis," Matthew Wilkins, iSuppli's principal compute platforms research analyst, said in a statement. "Because the third quarter of 2009 was stronger, the year-over-year growth rate in the third quarter of 2010 appears weaker than it was during the second quarter of 2010."