According to the IDC survey of PC shipments in Japan during 2004, Sales at Dell and HP Japan are up, while Sony and Apple saw a decline. In total, approximately 13.4 millions PCs were sold with notebooks outselling desktops by a margin of 140,000 units. Read More

The top three manufacturers in terms of market share remained unchanged - NEC, Fujitsu and Dell. However, Dell continued their strong growth to post a 20.9% increase in sales. The top three manufacturers accounted for just over half of the total shipments (50.7%).

Sony fell from 5th to 7th in this year's rankings; one place lower than their position in Gartner's equivalent survey. IBM Japan and HP Japan improved to 5th and 6th respectively. In particular, HP recorded a 33% increase in sales for the year; the greatest increase by any manufacturer.

4th place Toshiba improved sales 10.2% on the back of strong interest in their Qosmio line of AV notebooks. Panasonic also recorded good sales with an improvement of 28.2%. However, 10th placed Apple saw sales drop 15.8% due to supply issues with the iMac.