In the latest findings by the IDC (International Data Corporation), India witnessed about 3.7 million shipments of tablets including both slate and detachable in 2016. This translates to an annual about 3.1 percent. If we talk about Q4 2016, the tablet shipments amounted to be about 0.82 million units which are about 19.6 percent less when compared to Q3 2016 and 4.3 percent less when compared to Q4 2015. IDC blames this decline majorly to demonetization which occurred back in November 2016.
Coming to the top five vendors which dominated the declining tablet market in India, Datawind was still the top vendor with over a million units of shipments in 2016. Though the percentage of shipments decreased by 16 percent, the Canada-based company managed to attract a lot of first-time buyers.
Next to Datawind is Samsung, with about 17.4 percent of market share even though the South Korean giant witnessed a 21.6 percent of the decline in shipments over the previous quarter. The company recently launched its new Galaxy Tab S3 at MWC 2017 which might bring some attractive sales figures in future.
Next up is Lenovo with a market share of 16.9 percent and surprisingly experienced a positive growth of about 9.5 percent in shipments over previous quarters and 17.5 percent growth when compared to the same period of previous year.
iBall slipped to the fourth position as its shipments went down by about 20.6 percent over the previous (Q3) quarter. On the other hand, the shipments saw a growth of massive 34 percent when compared to Q4 2015. Further, iBall also leads in terms of 4G tablets in India with almost half of vendor’s shipments coming from LTE-based devices.
And lastly, we have Apple as the figures for the Cupertino-based giant grew 16 percent when compared to Q3 2016 and 17 percent when compared to Q4 2015. Amongst the lineup that Apple sells in the tablet market, iPad Air 2 remained at the top eating up almost half of its shipments while iPad Pro did a decent job of pulling in 22.1 percent of India’s total detachable shipments.
IDC predicts that the demand for tablets from consumers is likely to go down further whereas the demand for some large screen tablets is expected to keep this pace and the commercial use of tablets in India is expected to rise.