PWS shipments in the region had suffered double-digit declines over three consecutive quarters, but beat the analyst firm's forecast for Q4 2009 by growing 11 percent sequentially.
Mujin Kang, IDC senior market analyst of Asia-Pacific enterprise hardware research, described China as a "pivotal" driver in the regional market, accounting for 42 percent of total shipments in the quarter.
Kang pointed to education as the fastest-growing vertical at 59 percent year-on-year due to the strong uptake of computer-aided design (CAD), computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) and digital content creation (DCC) solutions. Although manufacturing held on as the region's largest vertical for branded PWS, he noted in the report.
Rajnish Arora, IDC research director of Asia-Pacific enterprise servers and workstations research, said vendors are now trying different tricks to boost sales and revenue in a changing landscape. "The key competitive differentiator for vendors is their ability to quickly bring to market highly optimized hardware platforms that seamlessly run a broad selection of packaged applications," he said.
IDC also listed HP, Dell and Lenovo as the top three branded PWS vendors in the region. For 2009, HP had a market share of 52.2 percent similar to a year ago, although this registered a 12.5 percent drop in year-on-year unit growth.
In second place was Dell with 38.6 percent, a decrease of 41.7 percent market share in 2008 and a 19 percent decline in year-on-year unit growth.
Lenovo's market share rose 8.1 percent from 4.5 percent from the previous year, and was the only one among the trio to enjoy a 51 percent year-on-year unit growth.