South East Asia is an interesting market, with so much happening there. There is also quite many millionaires with a lot of manufacturing happening there. The countries range from second class to first world and there is quite a boom in economies.
This is also felt in business and consumption habits, in an area that has a lot of food. South East Asians also love large smartphones, you will barely walk a street without seeing one holding a smartphone larger than 5 inch and using it to call. In-fact it’s not strange there to see people using tablets to call as their main smartphones.
Cellular News is reporting that this is a market experiencing double growth over the last one year with sales of 14.2 million tablets. This is huge, considering that in many markets tablets are yet to hit the sweet spot. In many markets the huge growth is actually felt when institutions like schools and others adopt them en masse.
Here in Kenya, low cost tablets will be used in primary schools as a government initiative, colleges like Strathmore have already adopted tablets for their students and some manufacturing companies are using tablets in their day to day jobs.
Laptops are still doing better in sales in all regions than tablets, even in South East Asia where laptops gorwth stands at 4%, but the tablets are doinf exemplary well with over 100% growth in demand.
“Consumers in the region’s developing markets eager to get their hands on the latest tablets and laptops spurred the overall market’s strong double digit growth rate in the range of 11 to 54 percent,” commented Gerard Tan, Account Director for Digital Technology at GfK Asia. “However, it is mainly the tablet market which has been the key growth propeller with four of the six countries reporting more than twofold incremental sales volume.”
Indonesia is the country doing biggest sales of tablets with 1.3 million devices going to the country, this is a 141% increase from the previous year. The Philippines is still doing considerably less device sales at 455,000 units, but exhibits the fastest growth in the region with 322%.
Source: Cellular News
