Tablet shipments drop for ninth consecutive quarter

Tablet shipments dropped by a fifth in Q4 last year, resulting in an overall decline in 2016

Tablet woes continued in Q4 of 2016 as shipments fell for the ninth consecutive quarter, according to IDC.

IDC research found that 52.9 million tablets were shipped worldwide over the holiday season last year, a 20.1 per cent decline on the same period in 2015.

Q4's decline contributed to full-year figures that saw shipments for the whole of 2016 down 15.6 per cent on 2015, to 174.8 million units.

"The sentiment around the tablet market continues to grow stale despite a lot of talk about vendors pivoting their product portfolios toward the detachable segment," said Ryan Reith, programme vice president of IDC's Mobile Device Trackers.

"We do see future growth in some emerging markets, like the Middle East and Africa as well as central and eastern Europe, with the sole catalysts being simplicity and low cost, [but] unfortunately for the industry these are the devices that don't equate to large revenues."

Apple maintained the lion's share of the market in Q4 at 24.7 per cent, with Samsung second at 15.1 per cent.

The largest growth came from Lenovo which saw its market share jump from 4.9 per cent in Q4 of 2015 to seven per cent at the end of last year.

IDC claims that, despite noise from vendors looking to challenge Apple and Samsung for market position by introducing detachable tablets, little progress has been made.

It added however that it expects notebook OEMs to enter the market in the second half of 2017.

"The market continues to warm up to two-in-one devices, but we're now getting to a point where the price and performance disparity between detachables and convertibles has started to narrow, and this added competition led to a dampening in the growth of detachable tablets," said senior research analyst Jitesh Ubrani.