Amidst financial woes and warnings that the company will struggle for the next calendar year, HP fell to second place in worldwide PC shipments behind Lenovo. According to recently-released Gartner data, Lenovo just was able to take the top spot with 13.8 million PCs shipped in Q3, a number that's up 10 percent from one year ago. HP, on the other hand, shipped 13.6 million PCs, down over 16 percent year-over-year. HP was hardly the only OEM to struggle, however — worldwide PC shipments were down 8.3 percent over last year, with Dell (down 14 percent) and Acer (down 10 percent) both struggling as well. While Asus only ranked number five worldwide, it was the only vendor besides Lenovo to increase shipments year-over-year (up 12 percent with 6.4 million shipments). Apple's nowhere to be seen in the top five vendors — Gartner's numbers only count "traditional" PCs and laptops, but not "media tablets" like the iPad.

From a US sales perspective, Lenovo didn't fare quite so well — the company shipped 1.4 million PCs in Q3, far behind HP, which held onto the number one spot with 4.1 million shipments. However, Lenovo increased sales by six percent and was the only OEM in the top six to do so. Dell and Apple took second and third place with 3.3 and 2.1 million computers shipped, respectively, while Acer and Toshiba rounded out the top six with about 990,000 units shipped each. Of note for Apple is its US marketshare of 13.6 percent — a high for the company despite its year-over-year decline in computers shipped. As the last quarter before Microsoft will begin shipping Windows 8, it'll be worth watching to see how these numbers change when Q4 has wrapped up. Also of note is Lenovo's forthcoming US manufacturing facility, a first for the company — while the plant won't open until next year, we'll see if that has an impact on its US presence once it is up and running.

Update: HP has reached out with its own response to the report, pointing to Gartner's exclusion of workstations as something that may make the report less "comprehensive."

"While there are a variety of PC share reports in the market, some don't measure the market in its entirety. The IDC analysis includes the very important workstation segment and therefore is more comprehensive. In that IDC report, HP occupies the No. 1 position in PCs."

However, the IDC report that HP references isn't all good news for the PC manufacturer. While it's true that HP does top IDC's preliminary results for worldwide PC shipments in the third quarter of this year, IDC also found that HP's shipments had dropped over 16 percent from the same quarter last year, while Lenovo's rose more than 10 percent. In fact, IDC found that PC shipments had dropped overall by almost nine percent, with only two manufacturers seeing an increase: Lenovo and Asus.