Networking giant Cisco regained market share lost in previous quarters, according to IDC’s first quarter research on the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) LAN switch market. The research showed that while the LAN switch market in EMEA continued to grow in terms of revenue the actual number of port shipments declined.
According to the numbercrunchers at IDC, port shipments fell 2.9% sequentially from a figure of 20.5 million ports in the fourth quarter of 2005 to 19.9 million ports in the first quarter of 2006. Despite this slight decline revenues increased 2.6% sequentially US$1.3 billion. “In the first quarter of 2006, Cisco proved again to be a very strong market leader in the EMEA LAN switch market by winning back all the market share it lost in the previous quarters,” said Peter Hulleman, research manager with IDC’s European telecommunications and networking group. Cisco (excluding Linksys) continued to lead the LAN switch market, increasing its market share to 35.3% in terms of port shipments in the first quarter of 2006.
In terms of revenue share, Cisco picked up 69.9% of the market in the first quarter of 2006, compared to 65.8% in the fourth quarter of 2005. The average sales price (ASP) of LAN switches in EMEA rose sharply to US$65.3 per port — an increase of 5.6% on the previous quarter. IDC attributed this rise to Cisco’s success in EMEA and the fact that the vendor sells a high proportion of high-end LAN switches with relatively high ASPs.
The increase in ASP was also partly due to the growth of the gigabit nonmodular segment of the market, according to IDC. Fast Ethernet port shipments slipped 5.6% during the first quarter of 2006 to 14.9 million ports with revenues from this sector dropping 2.3% to US$397.1m as a result.
In contrast, Gigabit Ethernet port shipments jumped 6.2% to 5 million ports pushing revenues up 5.4% to US$845.4m. While Cisco continued to dominate the market, other vendors made significant headway during the first quarter with both Force10 and F5 achieving double-digit percentage increases in terms of both port shipments and revenues. Linksys — a business unit of Used Cisco — also managed to achieve this level of growth.