A new data from research firm IDC reveals that though Apple Inc. (AAPL) is still the number one tablet vendor, but Android based rivals are rapidly catching up, and are pushing the market growth. The date published on Wednesday reported that overall market for tablets increased 7 percent in the third quarter with 47.6 million shipments of tablets worldwide.
Apple losing market share, but will bounce back
The market share of iPad declined to 29.6 percent while rival Samsung has steadily moved to 20.4 percent. This time it’s a close competition compared to last year when Apple had 40.2 percent of the market share and Samsung had only 12.4 percent.
Apple’s decision to launch its products in the fourth quarter from earlier in the year had lead to its decline of market share, IDC noted. However, the research firm believes that Apple will rebound again on the back of newly revealed devices; iPad Air and iPad Mini Retina Display.
“While some undoubtedly hoped for more aggressive pricing from Apple, the current prices clearly reflect Apple’s ongoing strategy to maintain its premium status,” said IDC research analyst Jitesh Ubrani. Analyst further commented that Apple alone did not increase the price of its small sized tablet, but Google and Amazon also raised the price of their recently launched tablets from $199 to $229 to envelope the cost of high resolution screens and better processors.
Samsung and other catching up
Samsung performed impressively in the third quarter of 2013. Samsung in 2013 doubled its shipment from 4.3 million in 2012 to 9.7 million in 2013, increasing its market share by more than 8 percent in quarter third of 2013 than what it had in 2012.
Others in line were Asus with 3.5 million f tablets, Lenovo with 203 million and Acer with 1.2 million tablets sold. Other players such as Amazon, Microsoft, Dell, HP together sold 16.8 million tablets making up 35.5 percent of the market share.
Lenovo acquiring the fourth spot witnessed 420.7 percent growth year after year. The Chinese firm increased the market share from 1.1 percent to 4.8 percent. Acer, who shipped 1.2 million units, an increase of 346.3 percent from 2012, grabbed 2.5 percent of the market.
