Gartner Says Worldwide Server Revenue Grew 17.8 Percent in the Fourth Quarter of 2018, While Shipments Increased 8.5 Percent
Revenue Increased 30.1 Percent and Shipments Grew 13.1 Percent in Full-Year 2018
“Hyperscale and service providers continued to increase their investments in their data centers (albeit at lower levels than at the start of 2017) to meet customers’ rising service demand, as well as enterprises’ services purchases from cloud providers,” said Kiyomi Yamada, senior principal analyst at Gartner. “To exploit data center infrastructure market disruption, technology product managers for server providers should prepare for continued increases in server demand through 2019, although growth will be a slower pace than in 2018.”
“DRAM prices started to come down, increasing demand for memory-rich configurations to support emerging workloads such as artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics kept buoying server prices. Product managers should market higher memory content servers to take advantage of DRAM oversupplies.”
Dell EMC secured the top spot in the worldwide server market based on revenue in the fourth quarter of 2018 (see Table 1). Dell EMC ended the year with 20.2 percent market share, followed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) with 17.7 percent of the market. Huawei experienced the strongest growth in the quarter, growing 45.9 percent.
Table 1
Worldwide: Server Vendor Revenue Estimates, 4Q18 (U.S. Dollars)
| Company | 4Q18
Revenue |
4Q18 Market Share (%) | 4Q17
Revenue |
4Q17 Market Share (%) | 4Q18-4Q17 Growth (%) |
| Dell EMC | 4,426,376,116 | 20.2 | 3,606,976,178 | 19.4 | 22.7 |
| HPE | 3,876,819,483 | 17.7 | 3,578,005,770 | 19.3 | 8.4 |
| Huawei | 1,815,071,726 | 8.3 | 1,244,382,075 | 6.7 | 45.9 |
| Inspur Electronics | 1,801,622,141 | 8.2 | 1,260,671,411 | 6.8 | 42.9 |
| IBM | 1,783,691,221 | 8.2 | 2,623,501,533 | 14.1 | -32.0 |
| Others | 8,158,910,239 | 37.3 | 6,243,556,262 | 33.6 | 30.7 |
| Total | 21,862,491,037 | 100.0 | 18,556,994,228 | 100.0 | 17.8 |
Source: Gartner (March 2019)
In server shipments, Dell EMC maintained the No. 1 position in the fourth quarter of 2018 with 16.7 percent market share (see Table 2). HPE secured the second spot with 12.2 percent of the market. Both Dell EMC and HPE experienced declines in server shipments, while Inspur Electronics experienced the strongest growth with a 24.6 percent increase in shipments in the fourth quarter of 2018.
Table 2
Worldwide: Server Vendor Shipments Estimates, 4Q18 (Units)
| Company | 4Q18
Shipments |
4Q18 Market Share (%) | 4Q17
Shipments |
4Q17 Market Share (%) | 4Q18-4Q17 Growth (%) |
| Dell EMC | 580,580 | 16.7 | 582,720 | 18.3 | -0.4 |
| HPE | 424,347 | 12.2 | 443,854 | 13.9 | -4.4 |
| Inspur Electronics | 293,702 | 8.5 | 235,658 | 7.4 | 24.6 |
| Huawei | 260,193 | 7.5 | 257,916 | 8.1 | 0.9 |
| Lenovo | 191,032 | 5.5 | 181,523 | 5.7 | 5.2 |
| Others | 1,723,032 | 49.6 | 1,499,593 | 46.8 | 14.9 |
| Total | 3,472,886 | 100.0 | 3,201,264 | 100.0 | 8.5 |
Source: Gartner (March 2019)
The x86 server market increased in revenue by 27.1 percent, and shipments were up 8.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2018.
Full-Year 2018 Server Market Results
In terms of regional results, in 2018, Asia/Pacific and North America posted strong growth in revenue with 38.3 percent and 34 percent, respectively. In terms of shipments, Asia/Pacific grew 17.6 percent and North America grew 15.9 percent year over year.
EMEA grew 3.1 percent in shipments and 20.4 percent in revenue. Latin America grew 20.9 percent in revenue, but declined 4.4 percent in shipments. Japan grew 3.3 percent in revenue, 2.1 percent in shipments.
Additional information is available to clients who have access to Gartner’s Servers Quarterly Statistics. This database provides worldwide market size and share data by vendor revenue and unit shipments. Segments include region, vendor, vendor brand, subbrand, CPU type, CPU group, max CPU, platform, price band, operating system and distribution channel.
Server market trends and infrastructure and operations will be further discussed at the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies events taking place April 23-25 in Tokyo, April 24-25 in Sao Paulo, April 29-30 in Sydney, May 6-7 in Mumbai, June 4-5 in Frankfurt, June 25-26 in Mexico City, and November 25-26 in London. Follow news and updates from these events on Twitter using #GartnerIO.
