New research from IDC shows that Samsung is slowly closing the gap between them and Apple for tablet sales. Apple’s iPad still remains dominant in the tablet space when it comes to overall number of shipments, but Samsung is not far behind and has steadily been gaining ground on Apple for a while with it’s own set of tablets that it offers. Part of this is due to the fact that Apple has a small range of tablets that run its iOS platform, while Samsung has a larger library of available devices with some running on Android and the others running Windows. With more tablets to choose from and two different OS platforms, it’s easy to see how Samsung could be gaining some ground.
According to IDC, Samsung was able to grow its tablet marketshare to 22.3% in the first quarter of 2014 which is up from 17.5% marketshare for tablets in the first Quarter from the previous year. That’s a 4.8% increase and an overall 32% year over year growth. Even though Samsung was able to increase their marketshare in the beginning of this year, Apple was still able to retain the lead. Despite this though, Apple’s tablet marketshare decreased as they had a negative 16.1% year over year growth, and saw a drop from 40.2% tablet marketshare for Q1 of last year to 32.5% tablet marketshare for Q1 of 2014. It’s safe to assume that if Samsung keeps things going at this rate and gains the same amount of marketshare Q1 of next year while Apple’s marketshare decreases the same amount, Samsung’s 2015 Q1 tablet marketshare could surpass Apple.
Samsung isn’t the only OEM that had to do with Apple’s decreasing marketsahre for the tablet space though. Other companies like Lenovo who jumped up to 4.1% marketshare and manufacturers that are lumped into the Others category rising up in marketshare by 2.4% from Q1 of last year had a role to play in Apple’s falling numbers. Samsung is by far the largest smartphone manufacturer globally and they’re sitting in position to overtake Apple for the largest tablet manufacturer as well. Last year in Q1 Samsung shipped 8.5 million units, and with this years increase they saw a shipment number of 11.2 million units.