Apple Thoughts - News & Reviews on all things Apple

"Mac sales saw double-digit growth in the third quarter of 2009, maintaining Apple's position as the fourth-largest U.S. PC manufacturer, according to new data released Wednesday from IDC."

The overall PC market grew 2.5%, surprisingly with all the recession talk. And as you can see from the chart above, Dell was the company hit hardest in terms of overall growth, losing 13.4% from the same time last year. The big winner was Acer, helped by the netbook market, with 48.3% followed closely by Toshiba with 37.4%. Apple had the 3rd highest growth percentage at 11.8% to go along with their 9.4% market share.

"Apple's 254 retail locations managed to sell 492,000 Macs to 38.6 million store visitors during the June quarter, with half of those sales going to customers who had never before owned a Mac."

Image Credit: Apple

Apple is crediting their new "One on One" program for the new user sales, a program that was revamped during the last quarter. It doesn't hurt that they increased their street presence, adding 6 new stores last quarter to bring their total to 258 locations. They are doing something right though, increasing the number of visitors during Q3 to 38.6 million from 31.7 million during same quarter last year, a 22% increase. This year Apple plans on opening up 25 new stores during 2009, as well as some remodeling work on 100 of them.

"NPD has released initial sales figures for the month of April, and Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster sees the year-over-year sales declines as generally good. According to his analysis, the declines should meet or beat Wall Street's expectations for Apple's third fiscal quarter."

In keeping with the financial news this morning, even though there were declines, it isn't anything that took anyone by surprise. The overall Mac sales numbers, US only, were pretty much flat for the "year-over-year" for April coming in at about a 1.8% decrease. The laptops were down 3.5%, but the desktop sales were up about 11%, based on the "line refresh", and the analysts say Apple will still sell about two million or so Macs. Sounds like a nice number during these times, but it will still mean a decline of anywhere from 8 to 16 % from last years numbers. Piper Jaffray doesn't seem too concerned though, they say it all falls within the Wall Street estimates. They must be confident, they predict a target share price of $180.00 USD for Apple.