IT analysis from IDC and Gartner. Gloomy reading for UK and rest of Europe, good news for emerging markets.

IDC says that worldwide IT spending is expected to grow 5 percent this year, led by demand for IT products in emerging markets such as China, India and Brazil, according to a report from market researcher IDC. The company expects IT services will grow 4 percent this year. In the U.S., where IT spending grew 7 percent in 2011, IDC is forecasting IT spending growth of 5 percent driven by purchases of mobile devices, data storage systems, and network equipment.

Enterprise spending on network equipment and data storage systems is expected to accelerate this year as businesses upgrade their networks to cope with exploding volumes of digital information. IDC also said the PC industry will return to growth this year after a slowdown in 2011 triggered by the shortage of disk drives.

"There are risks to the outlook for 2012, mainly related to macroeconomic weakness in Europe, where IT spending is still weak," said Stephen Minton, vice president of IDC’s global technology and industry research organization, in a statement. "In a downside scenario, things could get much uglier in Europe and have a ripple effect through other regions. But leading indicators in the U.S. have improved in recent months, and emerging markets show no signs of a slowdown yet."

IDC is predicting that IT spending growth in Europe will be less than 1 percent this year and only 3 percent in 2013.

The strongest growth in 2011 came from smartphone sales, up 46 percent year-over-year; software, up 6 percent; and disk storage systems, up 6 percent. Growth in 2011 came despite the impact of the hard disk drive shortage on PC sales.

Focussing on the UK, figures from Gartner reveal that total Q4 PC shipments fell 19.6 per cent annually to 2.95 million. Market leader HP suffered a sales slump of 27 per cent, and its 618,000 unit shipments gave it a 21 per cent share of the market.

Second-placed Dell saw its quarterly shipments fall 32.2 per cent on the corresponding period last year to 408,000, giving the Texan firm 13.8 per cent of the market. Despite a 5.4 per cent Q4 decline in units shipped, third-placed Toshiba has seen its market share jump from 8.5 to 10 per cent in the past year.

Apple, in fourth, was the quarter's only big winner, with shipments growing 17.2 per cent to 267,000. The Mac maker's market share has swelled from 6.2 to 9.1 per cent over the past 12 months. Fifth-placed Acer's annus horribilis came to a suitably nightmarish end. The Taiwanese firm's quarterly shipments plummeted 62.4 per cent to 230,000. Its market share was cut by more than half in 2011, falling from 16.7 to 7.8 per cent.

The market's smaller players had more joy in Q4, with shipments for everyone outside the leading quintet growing 5.8 per cent to more than 1.1 million. The percentage of the market held by non-top-five manufacturers has risen more than nine points to 38.3 per cent during the past year.

The UK's decline exceeded that of the other major western European markets, with French Q4 shipments falling 11.8 per cent year on year, and the German market contracting by 8.2 per cent. The PC markets in the troubled southern European economies of Italy, Greece, Portugal and Spain shrank by more than 30 per cent in Q4, according to Gartner.