ARM Server Units Keep Penetrating EMEA Markets- IDCPC Market Suffers 9.6 Percent Decline in First Quarter

International Data Corporation’s (IDC) EMEA Server Tracker shows that in the first quarter of 2015 the EMEA server market continued the positive year-on-year growth seen throughout 2014, to report $3 billion in vendor revenue and 557,182 units shipped, for YoY growth of 6.3% and 3.5% respectively.

The EMEA market has now shown positive YoY unit growth (3.5%) for the fourth consecutive quarter, though this is slightly slower than the growth seen in vendor revenue (6.3%), as vendor ASPs continue to increase as the EMEA market moves toward richer configurations.

Larger U.S.-based European vendors in 1Q15 have also continued to feel the impact of the fluctuating euro.

Looking at the market in euros, EMEA reported very strong YoY revenue growth (29.2%) in 1Q15, but a weakening euro has had a negative impact on some vendors that have been forced to adopt new pricing structures in Europe as the euro continues to depreciate against the dollar. It will be interesting to see how this will affect unit growth in the EMEA market.

The EMEA non-x86 market built on the positive signals seen in 4Q14 to report a good 1Q15, including the first positive YoY revenue growth in over 15 quarters (2.0%), reaching $526.2 million, as CISC and traditional RISC machines showed low-single-digit growth.

1Q15 saw strong yearly volume growth (up 102.4% YoY), driven mainly by the second shipment of ARM-based servers into the EMEA region; although this has a major impact on unit growth rates, these systems contribute less than 1% to the non-x86 server market.

“The macroeconomic fundamentals have remained strong and despite all major players having executed strong pricing adjustments to make up for the falling euro, server demand hasn’t slowed down. New projects in the cloud space have combined with a fairly broad infrastructure refresh on latest generation x86 chips especially in large global organizations,” said Giorgio Nebuloni, associate research director, European Infrastructure, at IDC.

“A number of major vendors that experienced transition periods in the past year managed to recover from the temporary declines seen previously and are actively building out their channel partnerships across our region,” said Andreas Olah, senior research analyst, European Infrastructure, at IDC.

“At the same time, the rise in ODMs continues to put increasing pressure on established players, while competition is also heating up in niche areas with more vertical and workload specific models emerging. This trend drives the convergence of form factors and continuous advances in the hyper-converged space.