Here's the May retail sales results from Computer Intelligence. According to this Compaq's taking it on the chin - a 10% share drop in May!
June 26, 1998
May Spreads Doom in Retaildom
HP Rises Though, and Compaq Takes It On The Chin
As all of our thousands of regular readers know, ZD Market Intelligence spends a lot of time and effort tracking how well products move on many fronts, and sometimes the results are amazing. Amazement arrived this month in the form of PC sales through the retail channel. After the first four months of the year all showed 30%+ growth, the serious downturn in May was a big shock.
May sales were up only a paltry 0.7% over May 1997, but more importantly, they were down 80,000 units from April, a drop well over 20%. There is a tendency at this point to declare that the sky is falling. While I'm concerned, the fact that Win/98 was coming, and that there were few compelling price cuts, makes it possible that customers, who are now conditioned to expect constantly lower prices, waited out for a month. Not only that, the exciting new products coming the June/July refresh were badly kept secrets.
Source:ÿ StoreBoard
However, the decline was not felt equally by all vendors. HP was able to keep most of their desktop sells through volume in place, and as a result, they were the #1 vendor. This is quite a big deal as HP has never been in this position before. IBM also did a great job as they actually had higher volume in May than April. The only vendor in that position among the majors. The big loser in all this was Compaq. Desktop unit volumes dropped by more than 40% from month to month, and share dropped by more than 10 points as a result.
Source:ÿ StoreBoard
Needless to say this is quite an upheaval in the market. Compaq clearly has to turn some things around in June if the quarter is to be a strong one. Also, their inventory position jumped up, and we all know the problems they've had there. A real question is how will this change set up the Christmas selling season. It's still a ways off, but as we get into August and September, it becomes hard to gain or lose share. So you can bet we'll be checking this closely ÿ here at InfoBead Insider |
