After they revealed last week how mobile phone shipments did in the first semester of 2013, IDC released this week the estimates for tablet shipments.
The biggest surprise is that iOS tablets(altogether) fall behind Android tablets in terms of OS market share worldwide. In the first semester of 2013, Android reached 56.5 percent market share, while iOS fell at 39.6 percent. Compared with the same period of last year, the numbers are almost reversed because last year iOS had 58.1 percent while Android had 39.4 percent worldwide market share.
We all know that there are dozens of Android tablets and that Apple currently has just 2-3 tablets on sale, but after what we saw last years, when there were just iPads against the rest of the tablets, this first report is still coming as a surprise.
Another interesting thing is that we now have some Surface numbers. IDC claims there were 900,000 Microsoft tablets sold worldwide in the Q1 of 2013, which means 1.8 percent of the total number of 49.2 million. That’s enough to put them in top 5, but at the last place for start. In this top five tablet manufacturers Apple takes the first place with 19.5 million tablets shipped and 39.6 percent market share. On the second place it’s Samsung with 8.8 million tablets shipped and 17.9 percent market share, almost half of Apple’s number. Samsung ascension is promising with an 282.6 percent year-over-year growth. But on the third place comes ASUS which overtook Amazon and reached a 5.5 percent market share having 2.7 million tablets shipped. In this first semester of 2013 Amazon only shipped 1.8 million tablets and got a 3.7 percent market share.
Year-over-year the tablet market is still going up with an incredible speed. If in the first semester of 2012 IDC reported 20.3 million tablets sold worldwide, in the first quarter of 2013 there were 49.2 million tablets shipped worldwide. The fight is going to be even tougher soon as Microsoft might announce the second generation of Surface somewhere at the beginning of this Summer and some analysts expect Nokia to also join this tablet party. And let’s not forget about Google I/O, where we will see the next Nexus tablet(s). I’m expecting the race for market share to become even more competitive and hope that manufacturers like Amazon, Asus and even Microsoft will come up with cheaper high-end tablets, if they want to challenge Apple supremacy.
