With an estimated 25,600 workstations sold in 1991, NeXT more than doubled its worlwide shipments of 11,000 units in 1990, according to IDC. NeXT's shipments represented the largest growth of any of the workstation suppliers, which also included Hewlwett-Packard and Digital.
Although it placed fifth with a market share of 5.4 percent, NeXT's shipments were still far below leader Sun Microsystems, which owns 39.6 percent of the market and and had 1991 shipments of 189,000 units.
During a press conference in July, Steve Jobs said the numbers showed that NeXT had surpassed IBM in workstation shipments.
But in the overall ranking, which included both client and server uses of the machines, NeXT finished slightly behind IBM. IBM shipped 26,900 units in 1991, giving it a 5.6 percent share of the market. NeXT did manage to place fourth, one spot ahead of IBM, in terms of the number of worksations being used as desktop machines rather than servers.