Tablet market facing sluggish growth in 2015

Days of double-digit growth for tablets are over, warns Gartner

The global tablet market is set for another year of modest growth in 2015, and will not return to previous high growth levels, according to Gartner.

The analyst predicts that in the next 12 months worldwide tablet sales will reach 233 million units, up eight per cent from 2014.

In 2014 growth of tablet sales slumped to 4.3 per cent, down from 2013 when shipments were up 68 per cent from the previous year.

Ranjit Atwal, research director at Gartner, said: "The collapse of the tablet market in 2014 was alarming.

"In the last two years global sales of tablets were growing in double digits. The steep drop can be explained by several factors. One is that the lifetime of tablets is being extended – they are shared out among family members and software upgrades, especially for iOS devices," he said.

"Another factor includes the lack of innovation in hardware, which refrains consumers from upgrading."

The worldwide combined shipments of devices (PCs, tablets, ultramobiles and mobile phones) for 2015, meanwhile, is expected to reach 2.5 billion units, an increase of 3.9 per cent from 2014, according to Gartner.

Traditional PCs (desk-based and notebooks) will reach 259 million units in 2015, with the overall PC market set to ship 321 million units, Gartner predicts.

The mobile phone market is on course to grow at 3.7 per cent in 2015, with 1.9 billion units shipped.

Annette Zimmermann, research director at Gartner, said: "The smartphone market is becoming polarised between the high and low-end market price points.

"On one hand, the premium phone with an average selling price at $447 (£291.99) in 2014 saw growth dominated by iOS, and on the other end of the spectrum you have Android and other open OS phones' growth area in the basic phone segment, where the average phone costs $100," she said.

"For the mid-range smartphones, the market opportunity is becoming increasingly limited."

In the operating system market, Android continued to lead the way as it surpassed a billion shipments of devices in 2014 and Gartner expects it to reach 1.45 billion in shipments for 2015.