The worldwide server market has experienced a decline in revenue in the first half of 2021, according to the latest data from industry analyst International Data Corp. (IDC) Quarterly Server Tracker. The market dipped by 2.5% year over year to $23.6 billion.

However, worldwide server shipments surpassed 3.2 million during the quarter, an increase of just 0.1% over the previous year. Volume server revenue was up by 5.6% to nearly $20 billion. Midrange server revenue declined 30.0% to $2.4 billion, and high-end servers declined by 32.7% to $1.3 billion.

Worldwide server market revenue grew 19.8% YoY Q220
Worldwide server market revenue grew 19.8% YoY Q220

“Broadly speaking, server market performance was muted in the second quarter as the market shifted slightly toward single-socket server configurations,” said Paul Maguranis, senior research analyst, Infrastructure Platforms and Technologies at IDC. “While servers purchased directly from ODMs declined year over year, some past backlog recovery within the hyperscale datacenter community contributed to a large jump in this segment when compared to the first quarter of this year.”

HPE/H3C ended the quarter in a statistical tie with Dell Technologies for the top position in the worldwide server market. The revenue shares for the two companies were 15.7% and 15.6%, respectively. Inspur/Inspur Power Systems ranked third with a 9.4% revenue share. Lenovo was in fourth place while IBM came in at fifth, with 7% share and 5.0% share, respectively. The ODM Direct group of vendors accounted for 26.7% of total server revenue and declined 8.8% year over year to $6.3 billion while accounting for 32.2% of all units shipped during the quarter.