When this year’s second quarter financial results began to roll in, it became clear that PC shipments, including notebooks, were down for yet another quarter. The only company not largely affected seemed to be Lenovo, which overtook HP as the world’s top notebook manufacturer. Lenovo’s shipments dropped only 0.6% year-over-year, while HP saw a 4.8% notebook shipment decline in the second quarter of 2013. However, as the holiday season approaches, it now appears that predictions of HP’s reclaim of the notebook market are set to come true.

DigiTimes today reported that HP has shipped 23.5 million notebooks during the first 10 months of 2013. This tops Lenovo’s estimated 22 million units shipped so far this year. The report’s unnamed “sources from the upstream supply chain” stated that HP is hoping to ship 28 million notebooks before the end of 2013.

HP’s minor comeback to reclaim the top of the notebook market could be due to its strong enterprise sales within the notebook market segment. As the official end of Windows XP in April 2014 approaches, business that have stayed contend with that operating system are now transitioning their infrastructure to newer Microsoft operating systems. HP has even announced an official partnership with Microsoft to migrate business still on XP to newer versions of windows, presumably ones that run on HP hardware.

(via DigiTimes)