IDC: Tablet market grows by almost 50% in just a year

According to IDC, the tablet’s market has grown by 49.5% from the same time last year (Q32011) and the firm has pointed out that number is just gonna get better as we approach the holiday season. Find out the run-down of the result after break.

Tablets are slowly becoming a must-have for professionals and students because of its portability and the fact that it can pretty much handle most of their computing needs. This need is evident on the recent study conducted by International Data Corporation which shows that there are 27.8M tablets shipped during the 3rd quarter of this year which translates to a 49.5% increase in the tablet’s market from last year.

Apple is still way ahead of the pack, which owns more than half (50.4%) of the total tablet market share. Despite of their commanding lead, however, Apple has actually lost some of its market shares last quarter. The company has seen a 9.3% decline on their share from the same period last year (59.7% -> 50.4%) and 15.1% over the course of one quarter (65.5% -> 50.4%).

Tom Mainelli, IDC research director for Tablets, believes that this huge market share loss is mainly due to the impending release of the iPad Mini during that time. With the iPad Mini and iPad 4th Gen now available to the public, the research firm predicts that Apple should be able to bounce back from the loss they had last quarter.

The four other manufacturers in the Top 5 list (Samsung, Amazon, ASUS and Lenovo) have benefitted from Apple’s declining market share. In addition, consumers seem to have started considering Android tablets as a viable alternative to the overpriced iPad.

Among the four companies, Samsung has experienced the biggest growth which now holds almost a fifth of the global market share. The company has quadrupled their shipment from 1.2M on Q311 to a total of 5.1M last quarter. In terms of quarterly growth, Samsung’ shipments were up by 115% from Q212.

It was a heated battle between ASUS and Amazon for the third spot. In the end, however, Amazon won by a hair with shipments totaling to 2.5M compared to 2.4M from ASUS. The two companies have mainly relied on their affordable 7-inch offerings (Kindle Fire and Nexus 7) to get them where they are in the rankings.

Although ASUS’ Transformer lineup is still doing relatively good, it’s the Nexus 7 that significantly increased ASUS’ year over year shipment by 242.9%. With the introduction of the new Nexus 7s with bigger storage capacity and data connectivity, ASUS should be able to carry this good streak this quarter.

It’ll be interesting to see how the Windows 8/RT tablets will do when pitted against the iPad and a barrage of Android tablets in the market. In our opinion though, it’s still too early for these tablets to have a drastic effect on the market this quarter, especially if manufacturers will not lower down the SRP to around USD400PHP 23,474INR 33,900EUR 381CNY 2,911.

Another factor that may also prove crucial to the success of the Windows 8/RT tablets this quarter is app availability. We think that once Microsoft and its partners got these two factors straightened out, they’re tablets will have a better fighting chance against other tablets on a different platform.

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