While we know that the demand for tablet PCs are going down due the growing sales of the large phone, recent reports again surprised us by showing the growth of the tablet market in India. There were two reports for Indian tablet market growth by IDC and CMR. Both have slightly different data but both claimed slight growth for the Indian market.
According to CMR, this growth was just 7%. As compared to last quarter of 2015, India’s tablet market grew by 7 per cent to 0.91 million units during the January-March.
Also See : List of tablets priced less than Rs. 10000
DataWind has kept its position retain and is the top tablet vendor in India. It managed to keep around 34.2 percent market share followed by Samsung with 21 percent tablet market share. Datawind’s low-cost tablet PCs are in demand and low-cost brought many customers for the company.
If we compare this data with the other report by IDC for tablet PCS sale in the Indian market, CMR has marked market share larger that IDC. IDC also claimed DataWind as the winner but with 27.6 percent market share. Samsung was in the second place with15.2 percent market share.
“Our low-cost devices which come bundled with one year of free web access remain one of the only ways for many in India to access the internet,” said Suneet Singh Tuli, president and CEO of Datawind.
Main confusion was with Lenovo’s position in market. CMR says that market share of Lenovo was only 4 percent and raked it at 5th. It raked Pantel at 3rd with 20 percent market share and Micromax at 4th with 10 percent market share. But IDC claims that Lenovo has 13.6 percent market share and is at 3rd place. Micromax and iBall are 4th and 5th place with 11.3 percent and 8.7 percent market share.
Windows based tablets also saw good growth in sales.
“Windows-based detachables continue to account over 70 per cent share. However Apple’s recent foray into this segment has garnered them to clock decent numbers given the premium price of their products,” IDC India Senior Market Analyst Karthik J said.
If we look back to the tablet market report for a previous quarter (Q4 2015), we found the good growth in Datawind’s market share. IDC reported 20.7 percent market share of Datawind in previous quarter. At that time, Samsung has 15.8 percent, Micromax has 15.5 percent, Lenovo had 13.8 percent and iBall had 10% market share.
As per IDC, strong sales of Datawind affected the sales of other vendors and all other vendors saw drop in market share.
While two reports lead to confusion, we know that Datawind is clear winner followed by Samsung. Lenovo will have to think about its position and see if it can do anything to boost its tablet sales.
