Tablets Pulled Down by Oversupply?
Vendors pumped up shipments in anticipation of demand, which seemed to taper-off as the year passed by
All is well that ends well, they say. By that count, not all was well for the India tablets market in 2013, as the shipments ended on a rather somber note in the last quarter of the calendar year. So, while the smartphone market performance during the year could easily be described as spectacular, the tablets market came up with an average show by comparison.
The market managed to rake in a shipment of 4.2 million units in the calendar year. In FY 2013-14, it was pretty much flat, clocking a growth of less than one percent at 0.5% over the previous year.
Major Developments
The year started on a strong note. It is understood that the buyback schemes during the early quarters helped push the unit shipments but that also led to saturating the demand faster, which in turn led to a subdued market later.
In a significant development, as noted by CMR analysts, the enterprise market showed a good uptake of tablets, accounting for around 20 percent of the shipment share in the third quarter of the year. Moreover, while Android continued to dominate the segments, analysts said the Windows-based tablets are expected to see traction after more vendors committed to the Windows platform.
Key Players
The leading tablet vendors were Samsung, Lenovo, Datawind, Micromax and Apple, with Datawind making it to the No. 3 rank in the July-September period of 2013 on the back of strong shipments during the quarter, according to CyberMedia Research data.
While the top 3 vendors accounted for 43.4 percent share of the shipments in the April-June quarter, it came down to 40.7 percent in the July-September period. Though this doesn’t necessarily confirm a trend, the market nevertheless showed signs of getting more fragmented, with at least 13 vendors shipping 20,000 or more units in a given quarter.
In the higher price segments of Rs 20,000 and above, there is a clear preference for Samsung tablets, followed by Apple devices.
What Next?
The demand for tablets has not quite kept pace with the supply, which was reflected in the fact that unit shipments started tapering off during the last quarter of 2013 itself. The decline into the first quarter of 2014 got steeper, with unit shipments amounting to 746,643 in the January-March period. This was a quarter-on-quarter decline of 27.7 percent over the shipment of 1.03 million in the October-December quarter of 2013 and a year-on-year decline of 17.5 percent when compared to 905,594 units shipped in the January-March quarter of 2013. The growth in the phablets market has already showed signs of impacting the seven-inch tablets sub-segment. If this trend gathers more steam then overall tablets shipment would also be impacted more.
A key inhibitor of growth has also been a lack of innovation by the vendors. There have been little changes in the form factor and ergonomics of the tablets, other than the screen sizes.
Another area of opportunity is the enterprise segment, as also indicated by the fact that enterprise category accounted for up to 20 percent of the tablets shipment in 2013. However, to make growth in this segment a sustained phenomenon, the vendors would need to have vertical-specific solutions around their product offerings. This calls for a need to contribute towards the development of an ecosystem of partners who could come up with a wide body of enterprise-focused mobility apps.