Apple share price: Researchers disagree about Q4 Mac sales

Research firms disagree about how many Macs Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL) sold in the final three months of the year – the company’s first fiscal quarter. Gartner and IDC issued separate preliminary reports yesterday, delivering two completely different scenarios for the performance of Apple’s Mac business in the quarter.

Gartner said that it saw a significant increase in US shipments of Mac computers in the period, while according to IDC the Cupertino-based company dropped one place from last year to be the fourth-largest PC vendor in the country, following a decline in US shipments.

Both researchers, however, agreed that 2013 was a bad year for the PC market as a whole. In yesterday’s trading Apple shares closed down 1.2 percent at $536.52. In today’s pre-market the stock rose 0.35 percent to $538.41 as of 10:10 UTC.

Rise or fall?

Apple shipped 2.17 million Mac computers in the US during the three months through December, according to preliminary figures by Gartner. This represents a 28.5 percent increase from a year earlier, an impressive result considering that overall US shipments fell 7.5 percent, according to the researcher.

Gartner puts Apple in third place amongst the biggest US PC vendors with a market share of 13.7 percent in the quarter.

However, the IDC research claimed that Apple’s US PC shipments fell 5.7 percent to roughly 1.6 million units. The decline was steeper than the overall decline of US PC shipment in the quarter, which IDC puts at 1.6 percent.

The figures issued by the two research firms are preliminary, which means that they will most likely change after the PC makers issue their quarterly results. Apple’s financial report for the period is scheduled for release on January 27. In its report for the fiscal year ended in September, Apple said it had sold 10 percent fewer Macs in the period.

PC decline

There is less disparity between the two reports when it comes to the broader PC industry. Both researchers agree that the downward trend in global PC shipments continued in the fourth quarter. According to IDC, PC shipments totalled 82.2 million units in the quarter, representing a year-on-year decline of 5.6 percent. Gartner puts Q4 worldwide shipments at 82.6 million, down 6.9 percent from the corresponding period a year earlier.

Lenovo and HP dominated the market, with both Gartner and IDC putting the Chinese company in first place.

As of 13:22 UTC buy Apple shares at $539.21

As of 13:22 UTC sell Apple shares at $538.90