The global server market, which grew at the end of 2017, continued to see the same trend in the first quarter of 2018, with sales revenue increasing by 33.4% and the amount of units delivered increased by 17.3%, according to Gartner, Inc.
Jeffrey Hewitt, of Gartner, explains the increase with the needs of medium and large companies investing in their infrastructure to "support server replacements and growth needs, even as they continue to invest in public cloud solutions." "In addition, in terms of average server selling prices (MVP) for the quarter, one of the factors was the fact that DRAM prices increased due to limited supply."
Regional results were mixed. North America and Asia / Pacific experienced particularly strong double-digit growth in sales (34% and 47.8%, respectively). In terms of quantity of sales, North America increased by 24.3% and Asia / Pacific by 21.9%. The EMEA region posted strong annual revenue growth of 32.1% while shipments increased by 2.7%. Japan experienced a decline in sales and revenues (-5.0% and -7.3%, respectively). Latin America saw a decline in sales (-1.8%), but revenue growth (19.2%).
Dell EMC saw a 51.4% growth in the global server market, based on first quarter revenue in 2018. This growth helped to widen the gap between Dell EMC and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Dell EMC ended the first quarter with 21.5% market share, followed closely by HPE with 19.9% of the market. Inspur Electronics experienced the strongest growth in the first quarter of 2018 with growth of 120.4%.
In server sales, Dell EMC maintained its # 1 position in the first quarter of 2018 with a market share of 18.2%. Despite an 8.5% drop in server sales, HPE secured second place with 13.1% of the market.
According to the IDC barometer, supplier turnover in the global server market grew by 38.6% year-on-year to $ 18.8 billion in the first quarter of 2018. Global server sales increased by 20.7% year-on-year to 2.7 million units in 1Q18.
The global server market continued to strengthen with a third consecutive quarter of double-digit growth, generating more revenue than any other first quarter. This record demand for servers is driven by a business refresh cycle, strong demand from cloud service providers, increased server utilization as a core part of the software infrastructure, expanded demand for new processors such as Intel Purely platform, growing deployments of new generation workloads. Average selling prices (MVA) increased during the quarter due to richer configurations and higher component costs. The increase in PVM also contributed to revenue growth.
Volume server revenue rose 40.9% to $ 15.9 billion, while mid-range server revenues increased 34% to $ 1.7 billion. High-end systems grew 20.1% to $ 1.2 billion.
"Abnormal growth continued to drive server volume demand in the first quarter," said Sanjay Medvitz, Principal Research Analyst, Servers and Storage at IDC. "While various OEMs are finding success in this area, the MDGs continue to be the primary beneficiary of the hyperscale server's growing demand, now accounting for about a quarter of server market sales and sales."
Dell Inc. and HPE / New H3C Group were tied for first place in the global server market with 19.1% and 18.6% of market share in 1Q18, respectively. It should be noted that IDC declares statistical equality in the global server market when there is a difference of one percent or less in the revenue or sales share between two or more suppliers.
Dell was the fastest growing server provider among the top 5 companies, posting a 50.6% year-over-year revenue growth of $ 3.6 billion and a revenue share of 1 , 5 point over a year. HPE / New H3C Group revenue increased 22.6% year-over-year, representing $ 3.5 billion
