Josh Ong
Strategy Analytics released on Thursday the results of its latest research for the tablet market in the December quarter. The data showed global shipments jumped up to an all-time high of 27 million units during the period, up 150 percent from 10.7 million in the year ago quarter.
"Demand for tablets among consumer, business and education users remains strong," said Peter King, Director at the market research firm, adding that "Apple shrugged off the much-hyped threat from entry-level Android models this quarter.â€
Apple stunned Wall Street on Tuesday when it announced record sales of 15.43 million iPads, a 111 percent increase year over year. The analyst consensus leading up to Apple's announcement of its quarterly results had stood at 13.5 million.
Though some industry watchers had predicted that Amazon's Kindle Fire, which came out in November, would affect sales of the iPad, Apple executives said there had been no "obvious effect" of the device on sales of its own tablet.
Shipments refer to sell-in. Numbers are rounded. The definition of tablet does not include e-book readers. | Source: Strategy Analytics
Google's Android operating system did reach a high last quarter, however, fueled largely by the Fire. The platform's 10.5 million units represented a 39 percent share of global tablet shipments during the fourth quarter. As such, the firm's findings show that Android managed to push the iPad below the 60 percent mark as had been previously projected.
"Dozens of Android models distributed across multiple countries by numerous brands such as Amazon, Samsung, Asus and others have been driving volumes," said Neil Mawston, Executive Director at Strategy Analytics. "Android is so far proving relatively popular with tablet manufacturers despite nagging concerns about fragmentation of Android’s operating system, user-interface and app store ecosystem.â€
Amazon said last month that it had sold millions of Kindle Fire units, but declined to provide more specific sales figures. Even without concrete numbers to go off of, analyst believe the Fire jumped quickly into second place in the tablet market in its first quarter of availability.
In third place was Microsoft, which managed a paltry one percent share of the tablet market in the quarter.
"The upcoming release of Windows 8 this year cannot come quickly enough for Microsoft, so its hardware partners can start competing more effectively in the tablet space," the report read.
Tablet shipments for the whole year reached 66.9 million units, up 260 percent from last year's 18.6 million unit figure. The firm's research also showed that consumers are increasingly preferring tablets over netbooks and entry-level notebooks or desktops.
While non-iPad tablets are only now beginning to gain a foothold in the market after several embarrassing flops from early entrants, Apple has watched its touchscreen tablet surpass PC sales. The company sold more iPads in the fourth quarter than estimates say HP, the world's largest PC maker, sold computers.
Apple CEO Tim Cook said earlier this week that he believes the iPad is not threatened by low-end, limited-function tablets and instead poses a threat to PCs.
"There will come a day when the tablet market in units is larger than the PC market," he predicted.
That day could come sooner than later, as sales of PCs declined by nearly six percent in the fourth quarter, according to research group Gartner, though Apple's Mac lineup remained impervious and posted more than 20 percent growth.
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74 Comments
Hmm. I would have thought that Apple was losing and was gonna have to release the iPad 4 instead of the iPad 3 to boost sales.
Without figures from Amazon that's a whole load of text the ultimately means nothing.
What nonsense.
First of all, it's a crock to compare published data for iPad's actually sold, compared to guesses about other tablets which simply shipped.
Secondly, it is absurd to put the Fire in with the rest of the Android tablets. They operate differently, and they run separate apps. They're simply different operating systems. For that matter, Android is so fragmented that this may be true for other non-Fire Android tablets as well.
Finally, it's not even clear that the iPad and Fire should even be considered the same device or market. One could easily argue that the iPad has more in common with a personal computer than it does with the Fire. If you want to see what a "real" tablet is, just look at enterprise, where iPad accounts for 96% of tablets in use.
Google can tell how many unique Android tablets have been activated [as in sold and used], but it's just a total wild-assed guess as to how many Kindle devices have been sold, as Amazon ain't saying how many they sold.
So these percentages just amount to random numbers. And for some reason, the people who put out these so called 'reports' just happen to have a vested interest in Androids market share being artificially enhanced.
Not to nitpick or anything (OK, so I AM nitpicking), that figure in the article about PC sales dropping 6%, is a little off. It's 8.5%.
The difference is due to the fact that 6% is the drop in total "personal computer" sales, including Apple's increase in sales thrown in there to soften the blow to the Wintel camp. When you take Apple's numbers out of the equation and only count Wintel PCs, you get an 8.5% drop.
Apple had a 26% increase in Mac sales last quarter (year-over-year).