El Segundo (CA) - Hewlett Packard once again showed a stellar performance in PC shipments. The company’s unit sales jumped 32.7% in the third quarter, outgrowing not only the industry average but also its closest rival Dell, which posted growth of only 1.5%.

According to iSuppli, Hewlett-Packard shipped 13.1 million PCs, during the quarter, up 3.2 million units from 9.9 million one year ago. The growth rate is far ahead of the industry average of the 13.8% and thus allowed the company to expand its market share from 18.3% to 19.2% in Q3.

Dell, which is coming out of a major restructuring, saw slight improvements in its performance but is still struggling to show its strength. iSuppli estimates that the company shipped 9.9 million PCs, up from about 9.8 million one year ago. Company market share fell to 14.6% in the third quarter, down from 16.3% a year earlier. Dell posted the weakest growth among the top 5 PC OEMs during the third quarter.

Lenovo is ranked third with 23.6% annual unit growth and a market share of 8.1%. However, iSuppli believes that Lenovo will be surpassed by Acer in Q4, which currently has a market share of 7.9% and will add Gateway’s (which the firm recently acquired) share in the next quarter.

Acer is also putting more pressure on Dell in the notebook segment, iSuppli said. For the first time, Acer is now considered to be world’s second largest notebook manufacturer behind HP, and ahead of Dell. Overall, Acer saw its PC shipments climb to 5.4 million units in the third quarter, up from 3.2 million in the third quarter of 2006.

Global Q3 PC shipments totaled 68.1 million units in Q3, up from 59.9 million in Q3 2006. Notebooks continued to drive the positive growth of the market with a shipment increase of 33.5% year over year. 43% of all new PCs sold in Q3 were notebooks.

Desktop PC shipments also increased and were up 3.4% from 37.7 million to 39.0 million in the third quarter of 2006, iSuppli said.