Global PC shipments slipped nearly 7 percent year over year in the final quarter of 2013 to put an exclamation point on a devastating year for PC makers that saw the worldwide market shrink 10 percent compared to 2012, according to Gartner.

The research firm called the free-falling numbers for 2013 —the 315.9 million units shipped was about what PC makers moved way back in 2009 —the”worst decline in PC market history.”

Worldwide PC shipments of 82.6 million units in the fourth quarter of 2013 represented a 6.9 percent drop from the same period in 2012—marking a seventh consecutive quarter of declining unit shipments, Gartner noted in a new report out this week.

But Gartner seemed to see some light at the end of the tunnel for a PC industry that since 2008 has been buffeted by an economic recession and new challenges from smaller computing devices like smartphones and tablets. The research firm includes mini-notebooks in its assessment of PC shipment numbers but not “media tablets” like Apple’s iPad.

“Although PC shipments continued to decline in the worldwide market in the fourth quarter, we increasingly believe markets, such as the U.S., have bottomed out as the adjustment to the installed base slows,” Gartner analyst Mikako Kitagawa said in a statement(Opens in a new window). “Strong growth in tablets continued to negatively impact PC growth in emerging markets. In emerging markets, the first connected device for consumers is most likely a smartphone, and their first computing device is a tablet. As a result, the adoption of PCs in emerging markets will be slower as consumers skip PCs for tablets.”

While PCs continue to play a crucial computing role for many consumers, particularly in advanced markets, the dynamic in emerging markets as described by Kitagawa has to be chilling for computer makers. A comparison might be made to the rise of telecommunications in in poorer countries over the past couple of decades. In many instances, less developed countries skipped over the installation of landline infrastructure to get their telecom coverage up and running, instead moving straight to cellular networks.

Even in a dismal PC marketplace, there were winners. Or, more accurately, one big winner, according to Gartner.

Lenovo became the biggest shipper of PCs in 2013 and was the only top computer maker to positively grow its unit shipments year over year. Gartner pegged Lenovo as shipping 53.3 million PCs last year, up 2.1 percent from 2012 and good for a 16.9 percent and leading share of the global PC market.

In second place was former top dog Hewlett-Packard, which shipped 51.3 million PCs in 2013, down 9.3 percent from the previous year, for a 16.2 percent share of the market. Dell was third with an 11.6 percent share, shipping 36.8 million PCs last year, or 2.2 percent fewer than in 2012.

Below that trio of companies, the drop off in performance becomes really stark. Acer (8.1 percent market share) saw its unit shipments decline a whopping 28.1 percent year over year, from 35.7 million in 2012 to just 25.7 million in 2013. Asus (6.3 percent market share) went from moving 24.3 million PCs in 2012 to just 20.0 million last year.

All other PC makers combined, a huge group of companies making up almost 41 percent of the global PC market, experienced a 10.9 percent drop in global unit shipments in 2013, going from 144.7 million to 128.9 million, according to Gartner.

Meanwhile, no amount of Black Friday and Cyber Monday pot-sweetening could prevent the PC market in the United States from shrinking considerably in the holiday quarter. HP held on to a leading, 26.5 percent share of the U.S. market during the fourth quarter. But the computing giant still experienced a 10.3 year-over-over decline in unit shipments and overall, the U.S. market shrunk 7.5 percent in the final quarter of 2013 as compared with the same period in 2012.

“Holiday sales of technology products were strong in the U.S. market, but consumer spending during the holidays did not come back to PCs as tablets were one of the hottest holiday items,” Kitagawa said. “We think that the U.S. PC market has bottomed out. A variety of new form factors, such as hybrid notebooks, drew holiday shoppers’ attention, but the market size was very small at the time. Lowering the price point of thin and light products started encouraging the PC replacement and potentially some PC growth in 2014.”

For more, check out PCMag’s 5 Questions with Asus chief Jonney Shih in the video below.