IDC: Tablet shipments decline 10.1% in 2015, leaders Apple and Samsung both lose market share
The tablet market is still in decline. — Q4 2015 is the fifth straight quarter in a row to see a decrease year over year: 65.9 million units shipped, down 13.7 percent from the 76.4 million units …
Context & Ripple Effects
This closes the loop on a year that began with IDC's first-ever quarterly tablet contraction — the Q4 2014 decline that ended five years of uninterrupted growth. Mid-year data showed why: in the Q2 2015 report, Lenovo, LG, and Huawei all grew while Apple's and Samsung's combined share slid from 45% to 41%.
Today's full-year figure confirms the pattern held: 2015 shipments fell 10.1%, and Q4 marked the fifth consecutive year-over-year quarterly drop at 65.9 million units. The story of the tablet market for the rest of the decade is whether the leaders can stabilize a category whose buyers stopped upgrading.
First-order effects
- Apple and Samsung both cede share in a shrinking market, meaning their absolute unit volumes are falling faster than the category itself — the worst combination for a hardware business built on scale.
Second-order effects
- Second-tier Android vendors keep absorbing the volume leaders shed; the trajectory visible here runs directly into the Q4 2017 report where Amazon's cheap Fire tablets overtake Samsung for second place outright.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the market splits structurally: a premium tier where Apple alone returns to growth — as its 15.2% shipment increase in the 2019 IDC data shows — and a disposable sub-$200 tier owned by retail-branded vendors, leaving traditional Android makers like Samsung squeezed out of both ends.
The trend: Tablets completed their transition from a growth category to a mature replacement-cycle market, consolidating around one premium vendor and a handful of ultra-cheap commodity players.