Sales of servers dropped in Q1 with worldwide revenues slipping four per cent to $13.3 billion.

IBM is still top dog in the sector and didn't suffer from the general market downturn. Its sales grew 13 per cent in the period to $3.3 billion.

The market figures come from IDC, which is releasing its research into the server sector later today. It's given CNet a sneak preview, which is where we've got the stats from.

HP, Sun, and Compaq, ranked two, three, and four respectively in the server top five, all saw sales drop in the period. However Dell, at number five, saw it server sales leap 21 per cent to $884 million.

HP's sales slipped five per cent to $2.12 billion; Sun's dropped three per cent to $2.05 billion, and Compaq's stumbled two per cent $1.96 billion.

The Windows server market grew seven per cent in Q1 to $3.2 billion, and the Unix market slipped two per cent to $6.5 billion.

Sun's got 32 per cent of the Unix market with sales of $2 billion; HP's got 25 per cent with sales of $1.6 billion and IBM's in third place with a 21 per cent share and sales of $1.4 billion.

In the US server sales plummeted 16 per cent to $4.4 billion and the Japanese market dropped 12 per cent to $2.1 billion. The areas of growth were Western Europe and the rest of the Asia-Pacific region which enjoyed sales of $3.8 billion (up 16 per cent) and $1.2 billion (up 12 per cent) respectively. ®

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