The Samsung Galaxy Tablet is headed for the leader position in the tablet worldwide market, a new Gartner report shows. The report, released yesterday 3 March 2014, indicates Samsung sold a total number of 37,411,921 units worldwide in 2013, a 336% increase from the 8,583,146 units sold in 2012.
“In 2013, tablets became a mainstream phenomenon, with a choice of Andriod tablets being within the budget of mainstream consumers while still offering adequate specifications,” said Roberta Cozza, Research Director at Gartner.
Apple’s iOS dropped 16.8 percentage points as the market was driven by the improved quality of smaller low-cost tablets from branded vendors, and “white -box” (unbranded) products continued to grow in emerging markets. Gartner said emerging markets recorded growth of 145% in 2013, while mature markets grew 31%.
Samsung ranked no. 2 with a 19.1% worldwide market share after Apple’s 36.0% market share, exhibited the highest growth of tablet sold in 2013. The expansion and improvement of its Galaxy tablet portfolio, together with strong marketing and promotions, helped Samsung shrink the gap with Apple. Just like its smartphone approach of over segmentation, Samsung’s tablet portfolio had a wider reach, wider price choice and developed new market niches.
Samsung has huge plans for tablets this year and word from Samsung IT Department lead Nandakishore Nair in East Africa is that they will be dropping low end laptops in favour of tablets which still have huge potential for growth. Robert Ngeru, Samsung Chief Operations Officer in East Africa says that they have huge plans for tablets and content in the region as it’s the next growth frontier.
“Consumers will move from the old computing model of PCs to tablets as the learning curve on tablets is much faster and costs also much lower. We are going to see the tablet move from a high end media consumption device to a primary computing device for many in the region as costs come down and awareness grows, tablets are the future.” said Robert Ngeru at the recent Samsung Africa Forum 2014 held in Spain.
