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ITCandor publishes a full set of Q1 2018 market shares and forecasts

PRESS RELEASE – Didcot, Jun 29, 2018

Strong ITC market growth in Q1 2018

In the last week we’ve published the following research posts covering Q1 2018 and the full year to the end of March:

The development of the markets demonstrate solid growth across the board. We’re entering a phase in which IT is being embedded into almost every device and utility and the first generation of digital transformation has taken hold in most Western countries. Read more »

Cloud computing services grow 19% in Q1 2018

In Q1 2018 cloud services (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS) revenues grew by 19% to $48b, net profit grew by 7% to $5.7b and the total headcount of those providing them rose 8% to 544k. In the year to the end of March revenues grew 26% to $195b, while net profits declined 11% to $20b. Read more »

IT services grew 6.7% in Q1 2018 – mixed bag, slow, big changes

IT services in Q1 grew by 6.7% in Q1 to reach $453b, with net profits (enhanced by the reduction in US rates as a result of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act) growing by 19.8% to $41.1b. In the year to the end of March total revenues grew by 5.8% to $1.9T and net profits by 11.9% to $183b. Read more »

Microprocessor revenues grew 17.4% in Q1 2018 – welcome to the Digital Age!

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In case we ever needed proof that we’re entering the Digital Age… the microprocessor market grew by 16.8% to $301b in the year to the end of March 2018, while shipments grew by 21.5% to 33.8b and net profit, by 41.1% to $60b. In the quarter revenues increased by 17.4% to $75.4b, units by 14.6% to 9.0b and net profit by 70.6% to $61b. Read more »

Mobile device sales grow 7.4% in Q1 2018

Smart phones, tablets and wearable computers are now the dominant client devices. There were over a billion of these ‘installed’ (if we can use the term for a mobile device) by the end of March compared with 846 million PCs. However we’re in a transition phase in terms of product transitions, with smart phone and tablet sales declining before smart wearable and IoT devices take up the slack (see my Figure for a forecast to 2025). Read more »

Network markets grow 10% in Q1 2018

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Network hardware revenues are a big component of the IT market, accounting for $44b in Q1 and $174b in the year to the end of March. ‘Unit’ shipments are harder to estimate than in many other areas; for the record I believe there were 2.9m network devices sold in Q1 and 11.7m in the year. Network port shipments were 373m and 1.5b respectively. Read more »

The PC market surges in Q1 2018 – HP tops revenue, Lenovo – shipments

The PC market is growing in vendor revenues (16% to $40b in Q1; 14% to $159b in the year to the end of March), unit shipments (14% to 59m, 11% to 235m respectively) and unit installed base (1% to 846m). My Figure shows that Lenovo was the world leader in terms of shipments and its installed base, while HP Inc. made most revenue due to a richer mix of higher priced products including workstations). Dell held third – and Apple fourth – place in revenues, shipments and installed base (see my Figure).

Read more »

Services and supplies drive the 9% growth in Q1 2018 peripheral spending

In Q1 2018 the peripheral market (including supplies and services) grew by 9% in revenue and 10% in units, while the installed based contracted by 2%. In the year to the end of March both revenue and shipment growth was 5%. My Figure shows the revenues of printers and others (which are mostly digital cameras); it shows the extent to which supplies have taken over the engine of growth for an otherwise highly mature market area. I’ve excluded services here, because the revenues are so much greater than these other categories; the revenue trend (like supplies) also shows an uptick in the most recent quarters).

The peripheral market is almost entirely based on proprietary products with the vendors working hard on technologies and policies to retain customers through tight control of aftermarket products and services – the majority of which is made up of printer cartridges.

Read more »

Q1 2018 – Dell tops the server market for the first time

I’ve been researching the server market since 1983 (when we called them ‘multi-user computers’); for the first time since then Dell has become the leading vendor (see the Figure, which shows rolling 4-quarter revenues for the leading suppliers since 2005). It has inched ahead of HP which duelled with IBM for top spot in all those 35 years apart from a brief period in which Sun (now Oracle) was the leader.

Read more »

Storage markets surge in Q1 2018

Storage systems revenue grew in Q1 by 4% to $7.8b and by 5% to $33b for the year to the end of March. However raw storage did better with disk drive revenues growing by 7% to $14.7b (by 9% to $63.0b for the year), DRAM by 22% to $9.0b (40% to $36.7b in the year) and NAND by a staggering 43% in the quarter to $17.1b (50% to $64.4b in the year). I am going to review the main trends in this post.

Read more »

Data management challenges in a regulated, hybrid, multi-cloud world

The capacity of raw storage is growing exponentially (see my Figure), which shows quarterly growth by the 3 main types – disk drives, NAND and DRAM (the latter 2, solid state drives). In 2017 a total of 1,500EB (1ZB) were shipped globally. While my data here includes all raw storage (including that used in mobile phones, tablets, laptops and desktop PCs), traditionally the majority has been used in servers and storage systems installed in the data centers and branch offices of commercial and government users. However the dramatic adoption of cloud computing has changed things in the last few years, with a growing proportion of raw storage devices now housed in cloud service provider data centers.

Many users are struggling to keep on top of the ever-increasing volumes of data. Getting a working data governance strategy in place is essential in order to become compliant with the EU’s GDPR and other similar data protection legislation. Read more »

Servers – new processor growth and the American bias


Servers are the heart of the IT industry and have a value far beyond the revenues made by their suppliers. Despite this the market has been slow to grow in recent years. 2017 was different – spending grew by 3% to $78 billion and unit shipments by 2% to 15.2 million, driven by new Xeon and Epyc x86 server ships from Intel and AMD respectivly. The Americas (and the USA in particular) have always been the strongest regional market (see Figure), with its lead being widened over recent years. Read more »

Storage – the raw v system dichotomy


Worldwide manufacturing of IT and communications equipment has a massive – and growing – bias towards Asia Pacific, so it’s hardly surprising that the region generates a lot more revenues for the suppliers than either the Americas or EMEA. In this post I will outline the main movements of raw and system storage markets. Read more »

Networking – a 2-horse Huawei and Cisco market with an Asia Pacific bias


In this series of posts on market development and shares in 2017 I’ve been focusing on the regional bias of various IT product types. Today I want to look at the network market. Although Cisco continues to dominate the enterprise network market, Huawei leads overall. Perhaps it’s partially because of that and the relative immaturity of China and some other large countries that there has been a disproportionate growth in revenues from Asia Pacific over the last couple of years (see Figure). Read more »

Peripherals – the Asia Pacific bias

The peripheral market is a mixture of hardware, service and supplies. Over the last few years it has shown a decline, mainly due to the improvement in screen resolution and online applications reducing the age-old need to print out documents and photographs. It recovered slightly in 2017, growing 3% to $247 billion; although this total was $68 billion short of the record total in 2010. The regional bias in terms of spending is towards Asia Pacific (see Figure) rather than the Americas, which is a growing feature of the PC market. Read more »

IBM Research Labs Zurich – neural, neuromorphic, quantum, crypto, blockchain, lattice computing… help!

In each of the last 25 years IBM has been granted more patents than any other IT supplier, putting it at the forefront of those actively designing future computer technologies. It has a string of 12 research labs around the world staffed by around 3,000 engineers and scientists well recognised for their activities (including 6 Nobel laureates). I travelled to Zurich to spend a day looking at a few of the research projects in a meeting chaired by Haig Peter. Some of their work-in-progress is difficult to grasp; quantum computing for instance is a mind-blowing subject – it seems the more I read, the less I understand! Nevertheless as an analysts it won’t stop that from attempting an overview. Read more »