Apple Computer says it’s getting itself gussied up to play the comeback kid in the home computer market and also nab itself a greater chunk of world market share. "We believe that in the last calendar quarter of this year, Apple will begin to grow in our market (share) year over year," said Mitchell Mandich, senior vice present of worldwide sales. "We think we have the product strategy, sales strategy to really help accelerate that growth."
Apple's world market share has slid to just 4.6 percent from 9.6 percent in 1993, according to International Data Corp. In Europe, its share is between three and 3.5 percent compared with market leader Compaq Computer with 15.1 percent in 1997, and IBM. Hewlett-Packard and Dell Computer following with 9.5, 6.7 and 5.8 percent respectively, according to market researcher Context of London.
"Over the last several years we've really been pulling out of the consumer market and we haven't had a product that really fits the price point of today's consumers," Mandich said. But that's changing. "You're going to see Apple later in this year with some products more oriented towards the consumer, the home user," he said.
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More of that Net business: Dell Computer, which sells directly to customers, expects to make more than half its sales through the Internet in the next few years, chairman Michael Dell said on Monday.
The process would start with the mass market, move to small companies, and then go to large firms, he said. "The Internet constitutes for us the absolute model for direct sales," he said. It allowed reduction of costs and made it easier to do business with Dell, he added. The company is currently making $5 million per day in Internet sales, of which $1 million came from Europe. Dell was making $1 million per day from Internet sales a year ago.
Reuters contributed to this report.
