Tablet sales grow, but not for Samsung and Apple

Neither Samsung nor Apple were responsible for pushing the global tablet market towards a rise in sales in the first quarter of 2024. In fact, both the South Korean and the American companies showed declines in their respective products, but the sector, on a in general, there was an increase of 0.5% in that period – a success coming from other brands.

The information comes from the most recent market report released by IDC. According to the organization, this is the first time that the consumption of tablets has grown since the second quarter of 2021 – since then, the industry has presented several setbacks.

In total, this “half a percent” of growth corresponds to 30.8 million tablets sold during the first four months of 2024. Within this panorama, IDC highlighted some points of analysis:

• Apple remained in the lead with the iPad, although its sales fell 8.5% compared to the same period last year, totaling 9.9 million units moved. IDC said this was likely due to Apple’s focus on clearing stocks of old units rather than launching new models consistently.
• Samsung remained in second place, selling 6.7 million units – a drop of 5.8%. The company took a long time to update its line of tablets (the latest is the Galaxy Tab S6 Liteitself a reinterpretation of a previous model), which, combined with the promotion of competing brands in Europe and Asia, contributed to the South Korean company seeing its numbers fall
• Huawei, Lenovo and Xiaomi occupy the third, fourth and fifth positions, respectively:
  • Huawei: 43.6%
  • Lenovo: 13.2%
  • Xiaomi: 92.6%

“The tablet market began to show signs of recovery in this first quarter. The real gains will likely come in the next update cycle, followed by growth within the commercial segment as more tablets are adopted by the education sector and the gig economy.,” said Anuroopa Nataraj, senior analyst at IDC.

“However, none of these factors will be sufficient as the friction driven by competition with PCs and smartphones will contribute to a deficient impression for the tablet sector. That said, there is upside potential driven by artificial intelligence capabilities as expected from other devices”.

In simple terms: the current increase should continue for a while longer, but it should not grow too much as tablets will still face renewals in smartphone and computer portfolios.

The AI ​​part is particularly interesting, as Samsung has started adopting the Galaxy AI ecosystem in some of its tablets (and the company plan is to extend this offer to all devices). At the same time, Apple is at the center of rumors that it has made various agreements with Google and OpenAI to implement chatbots Gemini It is ChatGPT on your devices – which will certainly include the iPad.

And you? Did you buy any tablets this year? Which brand? Tell us why in the comments below!