The EMEA server market continued its strong growth in the fourth quarter of 2014, reporting $3,7-billion in vendor revenue and 630 000 units shipped, for year-on-year growth of 1,2% and 4,4% respectively.
This is according to the International Data Corporation’s (IDC’s) EMEA Server Tracker.
For the full year 2014, vendor revenue was $128-billion and 2,6-million server units were shipped, with growth on 2013 at 3,4% and 1,2% respectively. This was the first full-year growth in both units and vendor revenue for the past three years for EMEA.
Looking at the market in euros, EMEA in 4Q14 reported very strong YoY revenue growth (10,4%), but currency fluctuations are minimising the impact on US-based vendors in Europe.
The EMEA non-x86 market showed mixed signals again in 4Q14. Revenue was down 22% year on year in the quarter, reaching $675-million, as CISC, EPIC, and traditional RISC machines all showed double-digit declines. On the
positive side, 4Q14 saw strong yearly volume growth (up 45% YoY), driven by initial deployments of miniature ARM servers in the region.
While ASPs in the non-x86 space declined to their lowest in 23 quarters, the EMEA x86 market has continued along its inverse trend, with ASPs continuing to rise to previously unseen levels. This increase in x86 ASPs pushed vendor revenue to $3-billion in 4Q14, a YoY increase of 8,3%, while units shipped only saw a 4% increase over 4Q13 (621 085 units).
This trend in rising ASPs was even stronger in the European markets considering the difficult global economic situation. 2014 saw the EMEA x86 market break the $10-billion mark for the first time as vendor revenue grew 9,7% over 2013. Unit shipments have continued to react more slowly, only seeing a 1,2% increase over 2013 to 2,2-million unit shipments in 2014.
Although the x86 market has shown continued growth it was outperformed by the non-x86 market, which gained 5% revenue share in 4Q14, accounting for 18% of all revenue generated in EMEA. IDC believes this trend is being driven by the emergence of big data, business analytics, and other compute-hungry applications.
“As macroeconomics in Western Europe continue along the path of slow, tiresome recovery, we believe a key factor impacting spending and prices in the first half of 2015 will be currency. Strong dollar appreciation is playing a role in setting local currency selling prices. If this continues through the course of the year, IDC believes there is a potential downside on discretionary spending, especially in SMB environments,” says Giorgio Nebuloni, associate research director with IDC EMEA.
The majority of this growth can be attributed to continued growth in rack-optimized server adoption — a market that contributed 59% of all x86 vendor revenue in 4Q14 and generated $1,7-billion in spending for the 335 000 units that were shipped into EMEA for 4Q14, to report a 1,6% YoY ASP increase.
Blade servers contributed 26% ($775-million) to the overall revenue spend in the x86 EMEA server market for 4Q14 — a 2 percentage point increase on 3Q14 — though unit shipments continue to slow in comparison to the same quarter in 2013. Tower servers reported revenue and unit YoY declines of 3% and 4% respectively, to contribute a little over $300-million in vendor revenue for the 146 000 units that were shipped in the EMEA x86 market.
