Tablet Market Started 2016 With Another Quarter of Declines, Reports Say

The global tablet market “began 2016 just as 2015 left off,” with another quarter of declines, Strategy Analytics said in a Thursday report. Q1 tablet shipments fell 10 percent to 46.5 million units in a quarter in which Huawei “cracked the top five vendors globally” with its 66 percent jump in shipments from Q1 a year earlier, the research firm said. Apple shipped 10.3 million iPads in Q1, a 19 percent decline from Q1 a year earlier and a 36 percent sequential decrease from Q4 “on low seasonality” following 2015's holiday selling season, it said. Though Apple’s share slipped 2.2 percentage points from a year earlier to 22.1 percent, it still maintained the top-brand share over Samsung, which saw its share slip 3 percentage points to 14 percent, it said. Android-branded vendors shipped 30 million units collectively in Q1, down 16 percent from Q1 a year earlier and 33 percent lower sequentially from Q4, it said. IDC, in its own quarterly tablets report Thursday, pegged this year’s Q1 market at 39.6 million units, a 14.7 percent decline from Q1 a year earlier. Like Strategy Analytics, IDC blamed the Q1 decline on early-2016 “seasonality,” but also “an overall disinterested customer base.” Though slate tablets still accounted for 87.6 percent of all shipments, the segment “has become synonymous with the low end of the market,” IDC said. “While this may bode well for vendors like Amazon that rely on hardware sales to increase their ecosystem size, it has not helped vendors who rely solely on greater margins for hardware sales.” IDC pegged iPad's Q1 share at 25.9 percent, down from 27.2 percent a year earlier, but well ahead of Samsung, with a Q1 share that declined to 15.2 percent from 18 percent a year earlier.