Huawei climbs, Lenovo dips and HPE and Dell EMC lock horns as global server shipments grow

Worldwide server shipments have grown by 2.4 percent in the second quarter of 2017, while revenues have also seen a slight bump up 2.8 percent, valuing the market at about US$13.94 billion, according to Gartner. Total global server shipments totalled 2.8 million for the second quarter, compared to 2.74 million in Q2 2016.

Gartner attributed overall growth to continued hyperscale data centre growth and strong regional performance in the Asia-Pacific region due to new data centre infrastructure projects, particularly in China. Server shipments in the region increased by 7.7 percent year on year to hit 841,319 units.

Gartner research vice president Jeffrey Hewitt said: “"x86 servers increased 2.5 percent in shipments and 6.9 percent in revenue. RISC/Itanium Unix servers fell globally for the period — down 21.4 percent in shipments and 24.9 percent in vendor revenue compared with the same quarter last year. The 'other' CPU category, which is primarily mainframes, showed a decline of 29.5 percent in revenue.”

Leading the server vendor pack in terms of the amount of hardware shipped was Dell EMC, with 492,854 shipments. Dell EMC was not the revenue leader, however, with that title going to HPE, which brought in US$3.2 billion in sales for 483,203 units shipped. Dell EMC’s second-quarter 2017 revenue was US$2.77 billion. HPE and Dell EMC’s respective market shares were 23 percent and 19 percent, constituting relatively flat capture for Dell EMC and a reduction in HPE’s hold on the market from 26 percent in Q2 2016.

Lenovo, which this year revamped its enterprise data centre portfolio with new ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile products, copped a hit this last quarter, shipping 38 percent fewer servers than for the same period last year. Compared to then, its market shared dipped from third place at 8.5 percent to fifth at 5.2 percent, shipping 145,665, units down from 235,265.

Huawei, on the other hand, is gaining ground in this space, increasing shipments 26.1 percent to 176,426 units from 139,866 and enjoying 57 percent revenue growth, the highest of the group, on last year's second quarter to US$845 million, up from US$535 million.

Inspur Electronics grew shipments by 31.5 percent to 158,373 units from 120,417. The Chinese vendor has market share of 5.6 percent, up from 4.4 percent in Q2 2016.