By buying Gateway and Packard Bell, Acer has now pushed Dell out of the number two spot among the world’s notebook vendors. HP remains the market leader.

In the last quarter of last year, Acer for the first time sold more notebooks worldwide than Dell, if we include the sales of Packard Bell and Gateway: both these firms now belong to Acer. This lifts Acer up into second place, but the market leader is still HP, by a large margin. Altogether, 5.5 million notebooks were sold worldwide in the fourth quarter, 41 per cent more than in the same quarter of the previous year, reports the DisplaySearch market research institute. It expects the world market to grow to 135 million items this year.

Only HP, Acer and Asus among the top 9 managed to do better than the market, though Lenovo and Apple almost pulled it off. By contrast, Toshiba and Fujitsu Siemens lost market share. DisplaySearch, however, has not announced details of the other manufacturers that grew disproportionately, by 64 per cent. A good half of the notebooks had a 15.4-inch (diagonal) display and 1280 × 800 pixels, while almost a quarter had a 14-inch screen with the same resolution.