The worldwide server market continued to grow through 2018 as worldwide server revenue increased 17.8 percent in the fourth quarter of 2018, while shipments grew 8.5 percent year over year, according to Gartner, Inc. In all of 2018, worldwide server shipments grew 13.1 percent and server revenue increased 30.1 percent compared with full-year 2017.

“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.