According to International Data Corporation (IDC), India tablet market inclusive of slate and detachables ended the year 2016 with total shipments of 3.7 million units with a marginal annual drop of 3.1 percent. “Shipments decline as the consumer demand for tablets continues to shrink. However, commercial shipments grew over 35% annually managing to offset declining consumer shipments to a large extent” says Navkendar Singh, Senior Research Manager, IDC India.
In CYQ4 2016, total tablet shipments in India was 0.82 million units with a sharp 19.6 percent drop over CY Q32016 and 4.3 percent over the same period last year. This is primarily due to seasonal decline after festive spike in Q3 and demonetization limiting the consumer sales in the last quarter of the year.
According to Karthik J, Senior Market Analyst, Client Devices, IDC India, “India’s declining tablet market saw few emerging trends in 2016. Detachables category grew annually by a healthy 30.7 percent driven by demand coming from both consumer and commercial segments. Detachables shipments is led by Acer which accounted for almost one fourth of the product category followed by Apple’s iPad Pro. 4G based tablets ramped sharply accounting for almost one fourth of total tablet shipments in 2016 against a mere 6% in the previous year.”
Top 5 Vendor Highlights:
Datawind: Datawind retains leadership position in Indian tablet market despite 16 percent drop in shipments over previous quarter. Datawind clocked over a million units of shipments in 2016. With low average ASP of around $52 and free internet access, vendor has been gaining market share catering to the untapped first time buyers from deeper pockets of India.
Samsung: Samsung sustains its second position with 17.4 percent market share. Samsung shipments declined 21.6 percent sequentially in CY Q4 2016 mainly due to poor consumer sales while commercial saw healthy growth. Samsung is likely to strengthen its commercial business and detachable portfolio with new product launches in 2017.
Lenovo: Lenovo pips iBall to take third place in CY Q42016 with 16.9 percent market share. Commercial segment focus has helped vendor shipments grow 9.5 percent over previous quarter and 17.5 percent year-on-year. In CY Q4 2016 consumer shipments also grew catering to demand from online festivals.
iBall: iBall slipped to fourth place as shipments dip sharply by 20.6 percent sequentially in Q4 2016. However, iBall shipments grew 34 percent year-on-year. iBall leads the 4G tablets shipments amongst Indian vendors with almost half of vendor’s shipments coming from LTE based devices.
Apple: Apple makes it to top 5 after a long time as shipments grew 16 percent over previous quarter and 17 percent over Q42015. While iPad air 2 remained the top selling model for Apple constituting half its total shipments, iPad pro accounted for 22.7 percent of India’s total detachable category in 2016.
Consumer demand for tablets decline is expected to continue in coming years as relevance of the category fails to exist in the era of large screen smartphones. However, commercial shipments to balance the consumer decline to an extent. “Recently, there is an increase in adoption of larger screen tablets in commercial segment we expect this to grow further in coming quarters. Detachables are expected to continue with healthy double digit growth in 2016” adds Karthik.
