"Australia has remained fairly resilient to major declines as the global IT sector has decreased the past couple of years, largely due to a very strong presence and focus by all the major vendors," said Matthew Boon, vice president for Gartner's hardware and systems research. "This continued in the first quarter of 2003 led by strong growth from Hewlett-Packard, while Sun also grew albeit at a lesser rate."
Across the Asia Pacific region server revenue totalled US$1.12 billion in the first quarter of 2003, according to Gartner.
China's server market revenue increased by eight percent in the first quarter of 2003 compared to the first quarter of 2002, cementing the countries position as the largest market for servers by capturing 32 percent of the market share.
The Indian server market revenue grew by 27 percent year-on-year in the first quarter of this year, partly because of a lower than average performance in 2002, according to Vinod Nair, industry analyst for Hardware Platforms, Gartner India
Singapore experienced a fall of five percent in server market revenue, indicating the economy was not quite out of the economic downturn. Much of the spending came from government and education sectors.
Gartner said growth in the Asia Pacific server market was encouraging after a few quarters of declining revenue, but warned the impact of SARS in the region would influence some segments of the industry.
"A number of key markets, including Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and China face challenging business conditions in the second quarter of 2003, thus we should expect that the second quarter could negate much of the first quarter gains," said Boon. "Many large organizations, particularly in the tourism, hospitality and services industries are looking closely at delaying capital expenditure programs."
