Apple continues to dominate the tablet industry

Before the end of January, IDC released the result of their research on the tablet market. As the firm have predicted, tablet shipment continued to soar as more and more people and companies adapt to the post-PC revolution. Not so surprisingly, Apple remains the dominating force in the industry, continuing to pull away from its competitors.

Apple had a very solid outing last year, owning 43.6% of the global tablet market with shipments reaching almost 23 million. Although iPad shipment have increased by little over 48-percent from the prior year, their total market share is down by 8.1%. A chunk of this market loss is claimed by their arch-rival, Samsung.

From a 2.2 million outing on 2011, Sammy’s tablet shipment has sky-rocketed to 7.9 million a year after. This stellar performance boosted the South Korean company to the far second place, taking 15.1% of the global market share. But as outstanding as it may sound, they are not the company that had the biggest traction last year. That title goes to ASUS which is in the 4th place.

The Taiwanese company couldn’t be happier with the way 2012 has turned out for them, garnering a year-over-year growth of more than 400%. They still have a long way to go to reach the top, but they are well underway if they can keep this level of performance.

Amazon, which is in the third place in the ranking, also saw some improvements on their total shipments. However, their market share is a bit on the downside, dropping 4.4% compared to their 2011 performance. Well at least the online retail has something to celebrate, unlike the company behind Nook Tablet who we think would like a do-over of 2012.

Barnes and Noble is slowly losing its grip (if it had one) on the tablet market with performance on the down trend. The company slips one place to the fifth spot, behind the biggest gainer of the year, ASUS.

2012 was a big year for tablet manufacturers. Demands for tablets soared, resulting to a substantial 75% increase in shipment from the previous year. Like most people, we also think that things will just get better moving forward as we embrace the new phase in computing. We can also expect Microsoft to play a significant role in the overall growth of the tablet industry, especially now that more and more slates are running on their touch-optimized OS.

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