Traditional tablet market falls but convertibles pick up the baton in sales

When it seemed that the tablet market, the traditional ones, the ones that first came to the market, was stagnant, now it seems that it is regaining strength, but with a little help and with nuances. And it is that while these tablets, the traditional iPad, the tablet with Android, do not present improvements in vital signs, the convertibles seem to have resumed the path of success

This is established by the latest IDC study which indicates that traditional tablets have been relegated to simple consumer devicesof media while it is the convertibles or the improved tablets (in the case of the Surface Pro or the iPad Pro) that have resumed the growth of this market.

Improvements in the fourth quarter

And that's traditional tablets, with end-user demand that has slowed significantly in recent months. Let us think that its demand has decreased by 7.6% in 2017 compared to the previous year, going from 53.8 million units in the same quarter of the year to 49.6 million units sold in the same quarter the following year. The overall figures, however, continue to be good, since 141.7 million were sold in the year.

However these devices don't offer much in terms of productivity and have largely been relegated to simple media consumption devices. And in the market they have been displaced by convertibles.

Thus, compared to the aforementioned 7.6% drop in traditional tablets, the convertible category is growing by up to 10.3% in the fourth quarter.This translates to 6.5 million traditional tablets shipped in Q4 2017 versus 43.1 million convertibles.

Waiting for the pairing of Windows and ARM

Nevertheless full-year growth showed signs of slowing down, with growth of 1.6% in 2017, below of growth of 24% in 2016. A slowdown attributed to the scarcity of launches of high-end devices similar to the Surface family, so that consumers and companies are waiting for product renewals.

If we look at sales by brand, IDC figures highlight that Apple maintained its top spot, although there were changes in the second, where Amazon outperformed Samsung for the first time.In addition, Huawei overtook Lenovo for fourth place by adding 1.2 percentage points while Lenovo fell 0.4 points. A table in which the top five sellers accounted for 69.6% of the market, up from 61.3% last year.

And in this sense, supporting growth, it seems that the support that this market will receive with the arrival of computers with Windows based on ARM processors will be essentialas it is expected that with the first devices arriving in the second quarter of 2018, growth will increase. In the words of Lauren Guenveur, Research Analyst in the Devices and Displays team at IDC:

And to date, much of the convertible market has been attributed to Microsoft and Apple launching their products in the United States enjoying good sales figures. We will be attentive to the first wave of computers with the pairing Windows and ARM to verify how successful their debut in the markets is.

More information | IDC