Buyers Not Looking for Branded, but Better Tablets

We all witnessed the dip in tablets sales including iPads some time back. However, the encouraging news is the rise of "no name" trend while buying laptops. A recent report from IDC has revealed three different points.

1 – Regarding the slow down in tablet sales

2 – The monopoly of Apple, which is ending. The market share held by Apple is 32 percent, which was 60.3 percent last year

3 – Consumers getting smarter and avoid running after brands while shopping for tablets

This is what I referred as "no name brand" above and this trend is swiftly on the rise. According to this report, 45 percent of tablets sold last year belonged to other brands than the major ones.

IDC firmly believes that this slowdown in the market is because of Apple's delay in providing something new in its iPads. A research analyst with IDC says that the news of a launch of an Apple product attracts masses and keeps them thinking about what this new version has for them. Since, Apple has delayed the launch of new iPad; it has made people stop taking interest in tablets resulting in the slowdown of the entire market. In short, Apple's inability to launch a new iPad has affected tablet manufacturers across the globe, as people discontinued buying tablets.

This delay in launching any version of iPad has made this company witness a drop of 14.1 percent and coming down to 14.6 million iPads. However, according to IDC, next four vendors after Apple experienced a huge growth in tablets sale. Samsung nearly quadrupled the shipment of its Galaxy tabs from 2.1 million to 8.1 million units. Similarly, Asus recorded a growth of 120 percent in tablets sale; Lenovo witnessed the growth of 313 percent, while Acer reported the increase of 248 percent.

Despite this, Apple holds a major part of tablet market and grips around 14.6 percent of the market share. Samsung and Asus hold the market share of 8.1 and 2.0 percent respectively, while Lenovo and Acer are following Asus has held the market share in 1.5 and 1.4 percent respectively.

Note that all these brands come after a very abandoned category called "others". This category is empowered by the customers who do not care about who are making their laptops. A very notable factor is that category gained so much influence in just a few years. In 2012, 26.2 percent tablets fall in this category, which increased to 38.9 percent in first two quarters of 2013 reporting sale of 2.9 million units. According to IDC, this is because of the entry of various vendors in the tablet manufacturing sector. Specialized PC and laptops manufacturing companies like Dell and Hewlett-Packard has also jumped in the sector of tablet manufacturing making the market more widespread for the consumers. Experts declare that tablet users have started looking beyond Apple and this has made bigger brands (excluding Apple) assume, where this market is heading to. So far Android tablets are tasting success more than Windows 8 platform based tablets.

CONCLUSION

This report by IDC clearly reveals that modern-day tablet users look for better platforms than better names and supporting the category of "others", which is called the "no name" category. Apart from being conscious about the tablet hardware, another feature that they look is price. As more and more players continue to rush in the business, we will witness further dip in the cost, which will eventually benefit only the consumers.