Spring tech sales bloom as Brits grab tablets
E-book readers, media streamers too
It won't surprise anyone to learn that Brits are buying more tablets than ever before, but they're increasingly keen on e-book readers and set-top media players too.
So the latest UK retail over-the-counter sales figures from market watcher GfK, covering April 2012, reveal.
Year on year, tablet unit sales were up 214.2 per cent. You'd never guess that netbooks sales fell 64.7 per cent over the same period, would you?
Tablets accounted for 9.9 per cent of all IT unit sales through retail - to all intents and purposes the same as laptops' ten per cent.
Notebooks accounted for 36 per cent of the money handed over for IT products in April - tablets for 28.8 per cent. In April 2011, the numbers were 42.4 per cent and 11.8 per cent, respectively.
E-book reader sales were up 70.7 per cent. What GfK calls "media gateways" - set-top boxes media players, basically - were up 29.1 per cent.
Big falls were recorded for storage products - down 37.1 per cent - and the aforementioned netbooks. Most other IT product categories were up or down a bit on last year's numbers.
"With [tablets] included, IT as a whole grew 14 per cent in value April 2012 on April 2011," said GfK analyst Christopher Kennedy-Sloane. "However, when we exclude this new category, the whole of IT fell one per cent over that same period." ®
COMMENTS
Wow 3 days since publishing and I'm the first to comment!
For this articl to be more interesting stating some actual sales figure would be getter than loads of percentages up/down.
As for netbooks; I think the reason the sales dropped has little to do with tablets, tablets are for media consuption, creation being tedious at best on these devices. Netbooks are for people who may want to do more with the device other than browse, email and such.
The main reason I have not yet bought a netbook is thst they are just a little to limited in performance, if a AMD Trinity box appears that would almost certainly change that opinion.
Personnaly I think Intel's Atom chips had more to do with strangling Netbooks than the rise of Tablets, and Ultrabooks are just too bloody expensive.
