Over the last two years, tablet shipments witnessed impressive growth, especially in Q4 2020, owning to the global pandemic. However, the demand for the tablets started showing a decline in Q4 2021, which continued in Q1 2022. According to a recent report from IDC, the overall tablet shipment fell by 3.9% year over year in Q1 2022, with a total shipment of 38.4 million units.
The report suggests that the decline in the shipments is due to the low demand for tablets as users have been holding on to their old purchases. In Q1 2021, a total of 52.2 million units were shipped, according to IDC. According to the report, the demand still remains higher than the pre-pandemic levels, but the growth seems to be slowing down, which can be seen as an indication of the market returning to normalcy.
However, despite the slowdown, smartphone manufacturers are not shying away from entering the tablet market.
“While the tablet market is certainly on a downward trend at the global level because of lower demand in mature markets, it is interesting to see several new players entering the emerging markets, especially smartphone vendors like Realme, OPPO, Xiaomi, and so on,” said Anuroopa Nataraj, Senior Research Analyst, IDC.
Apple continues to dominate the market with the iPad as it garnered about 31.5% of the market share. However, it’s not all hunky-dory for Apple the Cupertino giant suffered a 4.23 per cent loss in total shipments last quarter. During its quarterly results call, Apple did reveal the revenue from iPad was also down by 2.2% compared to the previous quarter. The Cupertino giant shipped 12.1 million units of iPads in Q1 2021, while it recorded a shipment of 7.8 million units in Q1 2022.
Anuroopa Natraj further adds, “While their volumes are not significant enough to move the market as of now, it is the high demand for tablets in the emerging markets since the onset of the pandemic that has led these vendors to take advantage of their existing channel presence to build an ecosystem where consumers possess multiple products of the same brand, just like Apple.”
Samsung secured the second spot with a market share of 21 per cent, followed by the Kindle manufacturer Amazon having a market share of 9.6 per cent. Meanwhile, Samsung and Amazon have shipped 8.1 million and 3.7 million units, respectively.
Lenovo came in at the fourth spot taking the biggest hit of a 25.9 per cent year-on-year decline in the shipments coming at 3 million units. Huawei registered a decline of 17.2 per cent with 2.2 million units shipped last quarter. At the same time, other manufacturers accounting for 24.1 per cent of the market share had a total shipment of 9.2 million units in Q1 2022.