After a ‘troubled’ 2014, the global tablet market will continue to experience a sluggish growth in 2015, analyst firm claims.
According to a report from Gartner, an estimated 233 million new tablets will be sold in 2015 that equates to an eight per cent increase in comparison to 2014.
“The collapse of the tablet market in 2014 was alarming,” said Ranjit Atwal, research director at Gartner.
“In the last two years global sales of tablets were growing in double-digits. The steep drop can be explained by several factors. One is that the lifetime of tablets is being extended – they are shared out amongst family members and software upgrades, especially for iOS devices, keep the tablets current. Another factor includes the lack of innovation in hardware which refrains consumers from upgrading.”
Gartner said the worldwide global device sales of PCs, tablets, “ultramobile” PCs and mobile phones are expected to grow 3.9 per cent to 2.5 billion units in 2015.
The analyst firm predicts mobile phone market will grow 3.7 percent to reach 1.9 billion units in 2015 and two billion units in 2016.
“The smartphone market is becoming polarized between the high- and low-end market price points,” Gartner Research Director Annette Zimmermann said in a statement.
“On one hand, the premium phone with an average selling price at $447 in 2014 saw growth dominated by iOS, and on the other end of the spectrum you have Android and other open OS phones’ growth area in the basic phone segment, where the average phone costs $100. For the midrange smartphones, the market opportunity is becoming increasingly limited.”
In the operating system (OS) market, the analyst firm claims Google’s Android, which surpassed a billion shipments of devices in 2014, will continue to grow at a double-digit pace in 2015, with a 26 per cent increase year over year.
Meanwhile iOS and Mac OS combined are expected to grow by just over six percent in the same period and growth of Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system is expected to outpace iOS from 2015 onwards.
“From 2015, we expect Windows to grow faster than iOS, as the PC market stabilises and the challenge for the next iPhone to find significant growth becomes greater, narrowing the gap between the two operating systems,” said Mr. Atwal.
The PC market (desktops and notebooks) is estimated to grow around just one per cent in 2015.
