24.9M Tablets Sold In Q2, With Apple's Share Of That Now Over 68%, Says Strategy Analytics
One of the strong points in Apple's quarterly earnings report yesterday was sales of the iPad. Globally, they were up 52% by revenue and 84% by unit sales, respectively to $9 billion and 17 million.
Context & Ripple Effects
Strategy Analytics' Q2 tally lands the same week as Apple's own earnings, and the two sources agree: 17 million iPads sold, up 84% by units and 52% by revenue to $9 billion, putting Apple above 68% of a 24.9-million-unit global tablet market. The pickup was broad — BGR, CNET, Engadget, MacRumors, PC World and others all ran the same numbers within a day, which is unusual saturation for a quarterly tracker release.
The share figure also frames the fight Apple is already in: it heads into a California patent trial against Samsung seeking $2.5 billion in damages, having offered Samsung a half cent per device licensing rate on standard-essential patents, while Samsung is the largest remaining challenger in the tablet share table.
First-order effects
- Apple's iPad business is now validated by an independent tracker as well as its own P&L, giving the company a defensible 'two-thirds of the market' claim in both investor and courtroom settings.
- Every non-Apple tablet maker — Samsung foremost among them — is competing for less than a third of a market that grew 84% by units in a single quarter at Apple alone.
Second-order effects
- Samsung enters the California trial with its tablet franchise trailing badly, which raises the stakes of the $2.5 billion damages claim and makes cross-licensing terms like Apple's half-cent-per-device offer a live pricing question for every Android OEM.
- Component suppliers and contract manufacturers face a customer base where one buyer sets volume expectations, squeezing margins for anyone building tablets on spec for the Android side.
Third-order effects
- If the share pattern holds, the tablet market structurally resembles the early-iPod era the description invokes — a single vertically integrated vendor defining the category while a fragmented licensees' field competes on price rather than platform.
- A market this concentrated invites regulatory and standards-body scrutiny of how essential patents are priced, since the royalty dispute between the top two vendors effectively sets terms for the whole Android supply chain.
The trend: The tablet market is consolidating around a single vertically integrated vendor, with patent-royalty disputes between Apple and Samsung becoming the mechanism through which the rest of the industry's economics get set.