Apple's iPad is the king of a declining European, Middle Eastern tablet market

Apple's iPad regained the pole position in the EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) market during the March quarter, but people in that region are buying fewer tablets overall, according to new IDC research estimates.

Apple's shipments climbed year-over-year from 1.982 million to 2.314 million, pushing its markeshare from 18.28% to 23.95%, the firm observed on Thursday. The leader in Q1 2018, Samsung, saw its share slide from 23.02% to 22.89%.

Apple was boosted by last year's iPad launches including a new "budget" model and redesigned iPad Pros, IDC argued. Other tablet makers didn't come close to either Apple or Samsung in Q1 2019 — Huawei managed just a 10.81% share, while Lenovo and Amazon sat at 6.66% and 3.34% respectively.

The EMEA tablet space as a whole shrank 10.9% year-over-year to just 9.7 million units.

"Demand remains weak in the consumer segment as the lack of compelling reasons for consumers to refresh their tablets has slowed the pace of device renewals," IDC commented. The commercial segment "continues to consistently outperform the market average," but since it represents just a fifth of EMEA sales, its growth wasn't able to compensate for consumer decline.

The impact of Apple's new iPad Air and Mini models remains to be seen. Both products launched too late into the March quarter to make much of a difference.

12 Comments

lkrupp 19 Years · 10521 comments

About 5 years ago

Quite simply the iPad puts all Android tablets to shame. Android has yet to be optimized for tablets and apps look like crap scaled up. The $50-$100 tablets you find on street corners and in the Dollar Store don’t even count.

seankill 15 Years · 566 comments

lkrupp said:

Quite simply the iPad puts all Android tablets to shame. Android has yet to be optimized for tablets and apps look like crap scaled up. The $50-$100 tablets you find on street corners and in the Dollar Store don’t even count.

The iPad has a long way to go, that said, I 100% agree with your statement. I had an Android tablet for awhile, a high end 2014 Samsung note 10.1, and it was garbage other than the screen and pen. Slow and the apps were useless, most of the time just phone apps scaling up to tablet screen size, often still leaving black areas of the screen. Disliked the screen ratio too. It was crap unless you just watch movies. My 4 year year old iPad 2 was better.

If theres anywhere I’d rather have Apple or nothing, it’s the iPad and Apple Watch. Just not a fan of Apple’s desktops.

apple ][ 13 Years · 9225 comments

iPads are like appliances, and they've been very powerful for many years now.

Who goes out and buys a new toaster every year?

Well, not that many people will go out and swap out their iPad every year either, when the current ones they are using are still great and powerful.

knowitall 11 Years · 1648 comments

EMEA is a bit laughable...

MisterKit 8 Years · 514 comments

If iPad sales decline, I don’t see how the reason could be anything other than that most everyone already owns one and is most nearly 100% satisfied.

I have six now. A maxed out rev 1 through to a maxed out mini 5. They are great devices.

if you don’t use an iPad what do you use and how do you claim that what you do use is better than an iPad?