UK leads world in tablet adoption

Country has highest percentage of web users

The UK is forecast to have the highest tablet adoption rate of any country on earth this year, with almost two thirds of web users owning a device.

Research from eMarketer finds that 35.8 per cent of the population across western Europe own a tablet. When the field is narrowed purely to internet users, the penetration rate rises to 48.6 per cent.

With 49.5 per cent of citizens owning a tablet device, the Netherlands has the highest rate of general adoption in the region. Not far behind are Norway (48.6 per cent), the UK (46.4 per cent), Denmark (45.8 per cent), and Sweden (42.2 per cent). By 2019 each of these countries will have tablet penetration rates of about 60 per cent or higher.

63.8 per cent

UK web users forecast to own a tablet by the end of this year (Source: eMarketer)

This year the UK is set to have the highest web-user adoption rate of any country in the world, with 63.8 per cent of connected citizens in the country expected to own one of the tactile devices by the end of 2015. Britain also possess the largest volume of tablet users of any nation in western Europe, with 30 million residents owning one as of the end of 2014. This is some way ahead of the region's other major markets: Germany, on 27.7 million; and France, on 21.8 million.

30 million

Current UK tablet users

In fact, the French and the Germans have two of the lowest penetration rates in western Europe, with the devices owned by just 34.3 and 34.2 per cent of the population, respectively. The only nations to lag behind this are Finland (32.7 per cent), Spain (31.1 per cent), and, at the bottom of the table, Italy (25.3 per cent).

In total there were 146.8 million tablet users across western Europe in 2014, a 29.1 per cent year-on-year increase. This growth rate is forecast to contract to 11.2 per cent this year, and then slow into single digits from 2016 to 2019, by which time there are projected to be 205.2 million tablet users in western Europe.