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For the full year 2015, vendor revenue was $13.2 billion and 2.6 million server
units were shipped, with growth on 2014 of 3.0% and 0.1% respectively. This trend
can be attributed to two main drivers — the weakening dollar that forced average
selling prices (ASPs) in local currency higher over the course of 2015, and the
continued movement towards richer configurations for compute-intensive workloads.

The prior influencer is prominent when looking at the market in euros; in 4Q15 EMEA
reported a slightly improved quarter, with a YoY revenue decline of 7.9%, which was
a major improvement when comparing a full year view of 2015 against 2014, when EMEA
saw a decrease in vendor revenue of 13.7%. 2015 also saw EMEA report flat unit
shipments, a slowdown that can be attributed to the rise in ASPs by U.S.-based
vendors earlier this year, as a means of stabilizing dollar revenues in a
challenging economic situation. IDC believes that if U.S.-based vendors continue to
increase local currency prices, the market might start to see more interest in Asian
vendors including ODMs.

The EMEA non-x86 market showed positive growth in 4Q15 when compared to 3Q15, as
revenue was up 17.9%, reaching $780 million and driven strongly by CISC machines,
which showed double-digit growth (57.6%).

"This growth was pushed by longer refresh cycles, some dating back to 2014, and
although this has driven the non-x86 market in 4Q15, larger vendors that play in
this market are still seeing a notable decline in annual refresh cycles, a trend
that IDC believes will continue into the foreseeable future," said Giorgio Nebuloni
EMEA associate research director, European Infrastructure.

“The x86 market in EMEA has started to see some normalization since the currency
impact started to ease, leading to moderate 2.2% growth YoY in vendor revenue,
reaching a new record of $3.1 billion, said Andreas Olah, senior research analyst,
European Infrastructure. "A large share of this revenue growth has been generated by
the construction of new hyperscale datacenters by several global cloud service
providers. In addition, the growing hunger for more powerful, mission-critical
machines with large memory pools has fueled further ASP increases, especially on the
blade side.".

Regional Highlights

“The strong performance of the x86 server market in Western European this quarter
(6.0% YoY) found a lot of impetus from the larger systems product segment, which saw
YoY vendor revenue growth of 39.1%, driven strongly by an increasing adoption of Big
Data and IoT, which have a thirst for high-availability solutions," said Eckhardt
Fischer, research analyst, European Infrastructure at IDC. Besides the larger
systems market, Western Europe also saw the x86 density optimized segment break the
$300 million vendor revenue mark, for YoY growth of 30.2%. A huge achievement as
more and more of the enterprise market finds its way to the cloud, driving the
buildout of the larger datacenters.

“Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (CEMA) server revenue
continued to decline in the last quarter of 2015," said Jiri Helebrand, research
manager, IDC CEMA. "Indeed, revenue fell by 5.5% to $891.83 million on the back of
weaker demand for x86 servers. In contrast, non-x86 sales recorded 10.8%
year-over-year growth driven by IBM z Systems refresh cycle. The Central and Eastern
Europe (CEE) subregion declined 4.6% year-over-year, with revenue of $475.59
million. The Russian market continued to underperform, while Poland, the Czech
Republic, and Romania observed double-digit growth thanks to improving economic
conditions and delivery of HPC deals. The Middle East and Africa (MEA) subregion
declined 6.5% year-over-year to $416.24 million as IT projects were scaled backed
due to the unfavorable economic situation impacted by falling oil prices. Despite
the negative business sentiment in the region, Turkey recorded double-digit growth
driven by demand from telecommunications and finance verticals.”.