Similar to Australia, all these countries saw growth over the previous quarter in unit shipment and revenue, except Singapore. A combination of seasonal low server spending in the second quarter and a still-cautious level of business confidence led to further contraction quarter on quarter in server shipments (-5.2 percent) and revenue (-38.4 percent) in Singapore. In China, the peak in purchasing in 2Q08 led to a drop of -2.5 percent year-on-year in the second quarter of 2009.

Shipments of x86 servers declined 16.6 percent year-on-year. At the same time, revenue declined 12.2 percent, accounting for 52 percent of the server market.
 
Mainframes had another strong quarter with 31.8 percent growth year-on-year, thanks to successes mainly in Australia and the South Korean financial sector.  On the other hand RISC/IA 64 platforms declined at 23 percent over the same period last year.                                                                                                      

Shipments of blade servers (including x86 blades and RISC/IA-64 blades) represented 12 percent of total units and reported 15.1 percent year-over-year growth during the second quarter of 2009.

All major server vendors experienced year-on-year revenue decline, as shown in Table 1, except Dell. HP retained the leading position in server shipments with 29 percent market share with majority of them in the x86 platform.

In revenue terms, IBM maintained its first position by controlling 39 percent of total revenue in 2Q09. Although IBM saw strong growth of mainframes this quarter, its Power Systems continued to suffer under the impact of global downturn and reported a double-digit revenue decline during the quarter. 

Dell increased its share of shipments to 22.9 percent in the second quarter of 2009, however continued to feel the pressure of the weak economy as volume fell 12.3 percent year-on-year. Dell had a better picture in terms of revenue during the quarter as it continued to take advantage of its direct sales model that appeared to help in increasing its product’s selling price.

Because of the uncertainty surrounding the effect of Oracle’s purchase of Sun Microsystems, the latter’s overall server revenue went down 33 percent year-over-year while its revenue share went down 3 points to 9 percent in the second quarter of 2009.