Bangalore: The market share of Apple has risen from last year’s 4.4 percent to 5 percent this year and has bumped to 5.3 percent recently. This rise has become a major psychological milestone to other Cupertino-based companies.

Most of the Cupertino-based companies ships around 13.6 miilion machines among which 80 percent are iPads. Apple represents 21.1 percent of the second quarter’s mobile PC shipments. Against the industry average the contribution is 4 percent, hence it can be said that Apple has a far way to go.

Leaving all behind, Apple is creeping towards the business sector. Apple outpaced the total market of 25.6 to 4 percent in homes and 43.7 to 4.8 percent in business. Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook has more interest in working with enterprise customers which may lead to higher business market.

China is the key driver of growth for Apple in Asia Pacific region as it is the second largest market with record sales of $45 billion during Q3 of 2011. This is also echoed in other world markets, where the company has gained 19.5 percent growth in Europe.  Hence the business market is more readily adopting Apple products because it has become “easier to work with.”

Canalys expects Apple to overtake HP to become the leading global PC vendor within the second half of 2012. Apple has seen its PC market share expand from 9 percent to 15 percent in just four quarters.

The Canalys PC market forecast for 2012 highlights challenging conditions during the first half of 2012, as flooding in Thailand continues to severely impact the global hard disk market. Thailand is responsible for around 40–45 percent of the world’s hard disk production, and the business disruption has already led to price rises. Hard drive shortages will further reduce inventories and shipments of desktops, netbooks and notebooks in the coming quarters. Canalys believes that side-effects will include a boost in solid-state drive (SSD) production and lower prices that will benefit pad and Ultrabook vendors.