Apple iPad Leads the Way in 2015

The tablet market was essentially created by Apple with their iPad tablet, following on from their success in the smartphone market with their pioneering iPhone. However, after the success of the first iPad release other companies jumped on the bandwagon. For a time, it looked like they would take over Apple’s sales, offering cheaper devices and doing their best to knock the mighty Apple off the top spot. However, Apple stuck to their game plan, releasing updated and improved versions of their tablet and giving consumers exactly what they needed and asked for. As we take a look at the figures for 2015 tablet sales so far, we see that Apple have re-established their dominating lead.

Tablets on the whole are not selling as well as they used to do. It seems that everyone has a tablet these days and the advent of the phablet — which does all that a tablet does and more — has further reduced the sales in this industry. As an example, from 2014 to 2015, Apple’s figures were down by a little over a fifth, with a drop of 22%. Samsung’s sales were down just 16%, but as we shall discover soon, they never had as many sales as Apple did to begin with.

One of the biggest fallers here was ASUS, who manufacture models at the cheaper end of the spectrum. They saw a 30% drop in year-on-year sales, whilst other cheap brands like Lenova, actually saw an increase.

Apple’s shipments for the first quarter of 2015 amounted to 12,6 million. There were close to 20 million in the “others” category, but this accounts for dozens if not scores of brands and there is no individual brand that outdoes Apple in this area. Samsung has the second highest sales, and at 9 million for the first quarter of 2015, they have some catching up to do if they are to rival Apple in the tablet market like they do in the smartphone market. Lenova, who we previously mentioned saw a big increase, have only recently gotten to grips with this market and only shipped 2,5 million units throughout this period, whilst LG Electronics, who also saw a significant increase, only shipped 1,4 million.

There were close to 50 million tablets sold in this period, and whilst that’s not as much as it once was, with the boom period almost certainly over for this industry, it is still a huge amount of sales and enough to ensure that anyone with the right product can make a profit in this business. Of course, if that’s what they intend to do then first they’ll have to topple Apple, whose dominant market share means that for every 100 tablets sold around the world, 32 of them are iPads, with that number amounting to just 5 for ASUS and 21 for Samsung.