The tablet market continues to suffer the downfall for a straight 10 quarter in a row. Global tablet shipment witnessed a downfall of 8.5 percent year-over-year decline in the Q1 of 2017. Merely 36.2 million units were shipped around the globe against the 39.6 million units in the same quarter in the previous year. The only sigh of relief is that the downfall rate is slightly less than that of the previous five quarters, which all suffered with double-digit drops.
The estimates have been released by IDC, which takes into account both slate as well as detachable tablets, which means the tablets with keyboards are included. Apple continued to maintain its top position followed by Samsung at the second spot. The top five companies accounted for 60.2 percent of the market in comparison to 57.3 percent of the previous year. However, no one managed to ship beyond 10 million units.
Apple’s shipment count also took a dive of 1.3 percentage points in market share. After 13 consecutive quarters of year-over-year shipment declines, the company has once again returned to the figures it witnessed in the first year of iPad sales.
The South Korean behemoth shipped the same number of tablets as the previous year gaining a 1.3 percentage points, and securing a lead over Apple.
Huawei managed to ship more than 700,000 units this quarter and turned out to be the only one among the top five companies which saw a growth. The company managed the third position in the tally by securing a 2.3 percentage point jump, ahead of Amazon and Lenovo.
In a statement, IDC program president Ryan Reith said:
As far as most are aware, the tablet market was created in 2010 with the launch of the original iPad, despite unsuccessful product attempts by other OEMs in the years leading up to this. The rate at which the tablet market grew from 2010 to 2013 was unlike many other consumer-oriented device markets we’ve seen before. However, it appears for many reasons consumers became less eager to refresh these devices, or in some instances purchase them at all. We continue to believe the leading driver for this was the increased dependency on smartphones, along with rather minimal technology and form factor progression.
