The analyst companies IDC and Canalys have reported that tablet shipments declined year-over-year in the second quarter while Chromebooks were resilient. Global tablet shipments had declined 29.9% to 28.3 million units while Chromebooks rose 1% to 5.9 million units,.
It"s worth noting here that IDC said Chromebooks declined slightly while Canalys said shipments rose slightly. We"ve included Canalys" figures below because there were significant errors in the data provided by IDC.
We previously reported on Apple’s resiliency in the face of inflationary pressures. However, while the company managed to remain the leader in the tablet space at 37% market share, it still suffered a decline in shipments of 16.8% year-over-year. This is notable because Apple customers are held up as more affluent buyers but even they seem to be being affected now too.
IDC believes that the affluent user base that Apple has could leave the company in a better position than competitors to recover from the current decline. It also said Samsung is looking to increase demand in the high-end tablet segment with premium and large-screen products in the second half of the year.
Speaking about the findings, Jitesh Ubrani from IDC said:
‘There"s further bifurcation in the tablet market as iPads capture the high end and brands such as Xiaomi and Lenovo proliferate within the low end. This poses challenges for the mid-market as many consumers gravitate towards the extremes in pricing.’
The breakdown of the tablet global market share is as follows:
On the Chromebook side, IDC did a wonderful job of messing up its data but luckily Canalys has an almost identical report with a correct set of figures. It shows that the Chromebook market was buoyed greatly by HP which saw annual growth in Q2 of 69.2%, growing its market share from 16% to 26.7%, leapfrogging Lenovo, Dell, and Acer.
Here’s how the Chromebook market share breaks down:
According to Canalys, the Chromebook growth was driven by strong demand in the education sector. Given UNESCO’s recent call to get tech out of the classroom, it’ll be interesting to see if Chromebook sales suffer going forward.