Worldwide tablet shipments recorded a year-on-year decline in the fourth quarter of 2014 for the first time since the market’s inception in 2010, according to latest figures from IDC.
Overall shipments for tablets and 2-in-1 devices fell by 3.2% to 76.1 million in the Q4 period, although shipments for the full year 2014 increased by 4.4% to 229.6 million units.
“The tablet market is still very top heavy in the sense that it relies mostly on Apple and Samsung to carry the market forwa rd each year," said Jitesh Ubrani, senior research analyst at IDC. "Although Apple expanded its iPad lineup by keeping around older models and offering a lower entry price point of $249, it still wasn’t enough to spur iPad sales given the excitement around the launch of the new iPhones.”
Ubrani added that although Samsung continued to struggle in the last three months of 2014 amid competition from low-cost vendors, the South Korean manufacturer still managed to hold on to the second place with 11 million units shipped in the quarter. The company was also able to achieve its goal of 40 million tablets in 2014, up 1.1% from 2013.
Meanwhile IDC noted that Apple’s lead over other vendors has yet to be truly challenged as it shipped 21.4 million tablets in Q4, accounting for over a quarter of the market with 28.1% volume share.
Lenovo (4.8%), ASUS (4%), and Amazon (2.3%) rounded out the top five, although only Lenovo managed to grow annually when compared to Q4 2013, IDC said.
The research company noted that Lenovo has an ideal range that covers most screen sizes on both Android and Windows, allowing it to capture the benefits of the shift towards larger screen sizes and productivity in general.
