Only Samsung will challenge Apple's iPad in 2012
Single-figure market shares for the rest
Apple's share of the tablet market may be heading downward, but it's still going to sell a shedload of fondleslabs next year.
Most market watchers would express such a description of the table business if asked, but an analyst at Canaccord Genuity, an investment bank, has added some numbers to the picture.
According to CG's Michael Walkley, Apple will take 57 per cent of the tablet market in 2012, well down on the 90-odd per cent it took in 2010.
Of course, the growth in unit shipments more than compensates the Mac maker for its share slippage. Some 102.3m tablets will ship in 2012, CG reckons, up from 18.1m in 2010 and 60.3m in 2011.
Shipments of iPads will account for 58.8m of those, with every other player battling each other for the remainder. The only other supplier with double-digit shipments, CG thinks, will be Samsung, shipping 10m tablets for a ten per cent share of the market.
CG has most players upping their shipments between 2012 and 2011, most notably the aforementioned Apple and Samsung, but also Amazon - 2m units in 2011, 5m in 2012 - and Nokia: no units this year, 3m in 2012.
Nokia is expected to jump on the Windows 8 bandwagon, as will a variety of PC makers, such as Dell, HP and Lenovo. Together this latter group will account for 4.5m units in 2012, some Android, most Windows 8.
Asus' share will dip a percentage point to four per cent, despite shipment growth. RIM's rising sales will not lift its share beyond two per cent in 2012 - its figure for 2011, CG estimates. Motorola won't increase its shipments year on year, leading to a decline in market share from two per cent to one. ®
COMMENTS
units shipped != units sold so it renders these predictions quite useless
No accounting for the Kindle Fire?
I would have expected it to have a mention.
Doesnt seem likely
For one thing, there's no mention of Amazon, who as far as I can tell is the only other player with the content and backend systems required to compete, Secondly, they're basically predicting Apple's sales to be pretty much the same in 2012 as 2011, which would seem pretty unlikely even if they weren't going to release an ipad 3 in four months or so.
I think 2012 will see an erosion of the iPad share due to the Fire & Nook, maybe Microsoft will get in there as well but they're more likely to roll up in 2013, Xbox integration and the Metro UI (stunning job that, never thought I'd praise a MS UI), plus the fact that they own at syncng, should make it easy for them to become a player in this market, even late in the day.
You can set up an in-house App Store in the same way you can install your own Blackberry Server; companies don't need to use the one from the outside world.
You can even configure the iDevices to only allow installation of software from your internal App Store.
Ultimately, not as big an issue as you'd hope.
saturation
surely with the pretty massive sales figures, we will soon reach a point where everybody who is in the 'yeah, i might get one when the right one comes out' market, just decides to go out and get one (of which ever they want to get) and then don't buy another one for several years.
A previous poster mentioned "Maybe 150 million the first year" the article itself mentions "102.3m tablets will ship in 2012" these numbers all add up until eventually, everyone in the world owns one, and then there is no one left to buy the new ones.
