Phones are slowly killing the tablet industry
A funny thing happened while the Unbox crew was brainstorming about article list pitches the other day. While we were able to easily nail down several examples of phones from several manufacturers with different price points, we had trouble naming even 5 tablets that was worth the money nowadays, let alone in different price categories.
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Aside from the usual suspects like Apple, Samsung and Huawei, it seems like other manufacturers don’t see the point in releasing high-end or even mid-range tablets nowadays.
Tablet sales have been declining, steadily, and right now the market has shrunk continuously for 11 quarters without a reprieve. To put it in perspective, that’s more than 2 years of continuous decline for sales in the category. It’s a disaster.
A few years ago almost every major phone manufacturer was heavily promoting their tablet offerings. People like Sony, ASUS and even LG, along with Huawei, Samsung and Apple all had mid-range to high-end tablets for consumers. Now? Only a select few sell and actively market tablets to consumers, with the rest either silently releasing models for the sake of having something on the shelves or pulling out completely.
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Even Apple, ever the market leader, has felt the impact of the shrinking tablet market. According to IDC’s 1Q2017 results, while they’re at the top of the pile at 24.6% market share, the firm from Cupertino has felt the pile shrink bit by bit, as their shipments have declined to 13% year over year. Samsung isn’t doing any better, and despite having 16.5% of the tablet market worldwide, their shipments have also shrunk by 1.1% year over year. The only winner here is Huawei, who has seen their market share grow to 7.4%, putting them behind Apple and Samsung. They’re the only ones that experienced growth in the market, nabbing a 31.7% increase in sales. The worldwide tablet market shrunk 8.5% in 1Q of 2017.
2Q2017 has been gentler on manufacturers, and while the market still shrunk, it only went down 3.4% year over year. Apple grew a little, at 14.7%, while Samsung took a hit, contracting at just 0.8%. Huawei still wins big, growing an astounding 47.1%. Amazon wins big as well, growing even more, at 51.7%.
So why are less people buying tablets? Well, to put it in IDC’s program vice president of Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Device Trackers, Ryan Reith’s words:
“The rate at which the tablet market grew from 2010 to 2013 was unlike many other consumer-oriented device markets we’ve seen before. However, it appears for many reasons consumers became less eager to refresh these devices, or in some instances purchase them at all. We continue to believe the leading driver for this was the increased dependency on smartphones, along with rather minimal technology and form factor progression.”
In short, tablets are slowly dying because we’re becoming more and more dependent on smartphones for content consumption. Companies like LG, Samsung and Huawei are getting better at stuffing more screen real-estate into a limited space like a phone. Don’t get us wrong, there’s still a use case for tablets – they’re great for business applications, and they’re the preferred gadget of choice of parents for their kids. In fact, IDC attributes Amazon’s growth in 2Q2017 to their active marketing of tablets to kids in markets where they are active.
How about you? Are you still buying tablets? Sound off below.
