Worldwide tablet shipment growth is declining at a very fast pace, new report claims. According to the latest IDC research report, tablet shipment growth will increase just 7.2 per cent in 2014 to 235.7 million units, as compared to 52.5 per cent in 2013. In fact, 2014 is expected to mark the first full year of decline in iPad shipments.
IDC believes that one of the main reasons for the slowing iPad growth is the extended lifespan of the tablets themselves, as users are hanging on to them longer.
“The tablet market continues to be impacted by a few major trends happening in relevant markets,” Ryan Reith, Program Director with IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Device Trackers, noted.
IDC is of the opinion that tablet lifecycle has played out a little differently as compared to smartphone market and instead of replacing the devices in 2-3 years, “tablet owners are holding onto their devices for more than 3 years and in some instances more than 4 years”.
“We believe the two major drivers for longer than expected tablet lifecycles are legacy software support for older products, especially within iOS, and the increased use of smartphones for a variety of computing tasks”, adds Reith.
IDC expects Google’s Android operating system will continue to be the most popular OS for tablets, accounting for 159.5 million devices, capturing almost 67.7 per cent of the tablet market share, while Apple will stand second with 64.9 million iPads shipments this year witnessing a decline of 12.7 per cent from 2013. Windows tablet growth is expected to increase by more than 67 per cent to 10.9 million shipments, or 4.6 per cent of the share.
Meanwhile, IDC is also predicting that overall PC shipments would drop by 2.7 per cent in 2014, witnessing a slight improvement over the previous forecast of a 3.7 per cent decline.
