SAN JOSE -- Price conscious PDA buyers drove up shipments of personal digital assistants in the fourth quarter of 2001 by 58% from unit volumes in Q3, but the number of systems still fell 2% from Q4 of 2000, said a new report from Dataquest Inc. here today.
Overall, 13.11 million PDAs were shipped by manufacturers worldwide in 2001, which is an 18% increase 10.08 million in 2000, based on preliminary figures collected by Dataquest. PDA leader Palm Inc. saw its market share and unit shipments decline in 2001, from 5.58 million systems and 50.4% of the shipments in 2000 to 5.06 million and 38.6% share in 2001, said Dataquest.
"Considering the current economic conditions and the PDA market's weakness shown in the previous quarter, the PDA industry performed surprisingly well in the fourth quarter," said Todd Kort, principal analyst for Gartner Dataquest's Computing Platforms Worldwide group. "Strong holiday season purchases were a big contributor to the sales upturn. Palm and Handspring's average selling price fell to $165 as their price cuts continued and older inventory was pushed through the retail channel at low prices."
No. 2 PDA supplier Handspring Inc. saw its market share slightly grow in 2001 to 12.6% at 1.65 million units compared to 12.4% in 2000 at 1.37 million units, said Dataquest. Compaq Computer Corp.'s market share jumped to 9.8% in 2001 at 1.28 million units shipped vs. a share of 4.2% in 2000 with 466,000 units, said the report.
"Today, only about 20% of the market is willing to spend $400 or more on a PDA," Kort said. "Microsoft, Intel, Compaq and HP understand this and are fairly content to continue innovating with the expectation that prices will gradually come down and the platform will continue to gain adherents. They are also the only vendors making decent profits in this market today."
Palm OS PDAs captured more than 57% of the worldwide PDA market in 2001, with about 7.5 million units shipped, Dataquest said. PDA vendors offering systems using Microsoft Corp.'s Windows CE operating system controlled nearly 21% of the market, up from about 11% in 2000, said the San Jose research firm. Proprietary OS devices--which are popular in Asian markets--comprised about one-sixth of the worldwide market, said Dataquest.
The U.S. market accounted for nearly half of worldwide PDA shipments in 2001. The Asia Pacific region surpassed Western Europe, with shares of 17.4% and 16.5%, respectively, according to Dataquest. Japan accounted for 8% of the world's PDA shipments in 2001.
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