PC SALES SOAR WORLDWIDE.

Byline: Steve Lohr The New York Times

Compaq Computer Corp. retained its top ranking as the world's leading marketer of personal computers last year, but IBM edged past troubled Apple Computer for the No. 2 position.

The year-end tallies, reported Monday by Dataquest, a computer market-research firm in San Jose, showed that worldwide, personal computer sales grew nearly 25 percent, to 59.7 million. In the United States, PC sales rose 21 percent, to 22.5 million.

The strong sales of personal computers last year were fueled by the switch to machines using Intel's Pentium microchip and the introduction of Microsoft's Windows 95 operating system in August.

But company-by-company market numbers show that industry consolidation, long predicted by industry analysts, does not seem to be occurring.

The expectation had been that the market shares of the bigger companies would steadily increase, as they benefited from economies of scale in manufacturing and marketing.

Yet the market share of most leading PC makers held steady or declined last year, a trend that was particularly evident in the American market, often regarded as a forerunner of global market trends.

For the year, Compaq's U.S. market share fell to 12.2 percent from 12.6 percent; Packard Bell's dropped to 11.3 from 11.4 percent; Apple's to 11.1 from 11.6 percent; IBM's to 8.3 from 9 percent; and Gateway 2000's to 5.1 from 5.2 percent.

"The PC manufacturers market is becoming more fragmented, not less, at least for the time being," said Kimball Brown, an analyst for Dataquest.

The industry, in a sense, has consolidated. But it has consolidated around the producers of the key PC technologies - Intel's chip, and Microsoft's operating system - rather than around the manufacturers, like Compaq and IBM, that assemble the technological components.

Intel has gone further by producing PC motherboards, which house not only the microchip but also the surrounding circuitry for a personal computer. Many PC makers buy the motherboards from Intel, so they have to do less assembly work themselves.

For Intel, the strategy can be risky, as it discovered when it overestimated the demand for motherboards and its fourth-quarter earnings turned out to be disappointing. Packard Bell, which analysts say misjudged demand for low-end PCs, is a large purchaser of Intel motherboards.

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Chart (1-2--Color) Computer leaders Compaq continued to lead the nation and world in personal computer sales in 1995. But NEC, Hewlett-Packard and Acer grew the fastest. (1) World (2) United States AP