You probably noticed a series of pieces of news coming in hot these days, as financial results for Apple, Samsung, Huawei and more companies got announced. We now also know the state of the tablet market, as the IDC figures are in and it’s not looking hot, since the whole market declined 0.6% in Q4 2019.
Q3 was actually better, with a slight bump up, but now it’s downhill again, in spite of the holiday season. According to the latest IDC report, the tablet market is down by 0.6% year over year and 43.5 million slate unites were moved during the October – December time frame. Apple remains leader, just as the iPad became 10 years old. The Cupertino firm managed to sell around 15.9 million units in Q4 2019. Samsung is second with 7 million and Huawei third with 4 million.
Amazon is close by on fourth with 3.3 million and they actually dropped the most, by 29% compared to a year before. Lenovo is fifth, with 2.5 million units. We also have figures for the full 2019 calendar year, which was once again not very good for the segment. For the whole 2019 calendar year, the market shrank by 1.5% and global shipments totaled 144.1 million units. Apple moved the most tablets, 49.9 million more than doubling Samsung’s second place effort of 21.7 million.
Huawei only had 14.1 million slates and Amazon 14 million. It was a pretty modest year for tablets, between the only cheap iPad launched and from the Android field only the Galaxy Tab S5e, Tab S6 and MatePad Pro mattered, but the latter came too late to be felt in sales. 5G slates should start popping off more this year and Samsung already has one out. That whole niche may bring an increase to the market.
