XPC sales are booming in Japan, but the most important market is currently Europe, which makes up 40 percent of worldwide sales, compared to Japan’s ten percent. The other sales regions are the United States, Asia and Australia.
Henry King, an analyst at Goldman Sachs, told the news agency Reuters that sales of SFF PCs worldwide will “reach five percent of the total sales of 100 to 110 million desktop PCs.” He also forecasts that the market share will grow to more than ten per cent in the next five years. “The trend is to minimize PCs”, he explained. Shuttle has been described by the media as the market leader as a result of its superior quality and wide range of products. The “Innovator Award” awarded by the readers of Tom’s Hardware Guide further underlines this assertion, with Shuttle amassing 50 percent of reader votes in Germany, and more than 55 percent in the US.
Shuttle introduced the first XPC in 2001, selling 34,000 XPCs. In 2003 sales had grown to 560,000 XPCs. Market researcher Gartner believes the trend that saw one million SFF PCs sold in 2003, will result in sales figures reaching 32.1 million units in 2008. And with Shuttle enjoying a 50 percent market share Gartner noted: “We expect that XPCs will replace big grey towers".
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