Apple's U.S. market share for Macs reaches 6.1%

Posted October 19th, 2006 05:07:29 PM (GMT) by Alexandros Roussos

According to just released analyst studies, Apple's market share has significantly climbed in a year over year basis, with one of the studies claiming it has reached over 6.1% in the U.S. market. Yesterday, the company announced record Mac sales and steady iPod sales and posted $546 million of profit on revenue of $4.88 billion.

Analyst Gartner is claiming that, with gowth of 30% this quarter, Apple occupies the fourth position in the U.S. PC market, just behind Gateway which has 6.4%. The company has registered the biggest growth of all PC makers for this quarter and year over year sales.

Apple's wordwide market share has also increased to 2.7% with over 5.3 million computers sold for the 2006 financial calendar year and 1.61 million sold this quarter.

A second study by IDC shows similar figures: Apple's market share is 5.8% and the company is also occupies the fourth position behind Gateway which has 6%.

Since last year, analysts have been predicting that Apple would significantly increase its market share in 2006 because of the halo effect produced by the iPod's success resulting in a significantly increased momentum on Apple's brand. These analysts continue to believe that in all the PC industry's history, "never a company had ever been so well positioned to gain market share".

The market is clearly seeing a shift to laptops in favor of desktops, and Apple sales reflect that as almost 1 million MacBooks and MacBook Pros were sold this quarter, representing 61% of its overall quarterly sales.

Dell and HP are remaining, respectively, first and second biggest PC makers in the U.S. with 32.1% and 23% of market share, according to Gartner. However, HP has surpassed DELL for worldwide figures for the first time since years.

Apple's shares were up more than 5% yesterday in after hours trading session and continued to climb this afternoon, as investors and analysts reacted very positively on the earnings posted and the guidance provided in yesterday's Q4 financial conference.

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