As the 2014 comes to final closure, the complete year sales of tech giant Apple’s flagship iPads are expected to decline for the first time in the five-year history of the tablet.
A new report by ABI Research on Tuesday made forecast that the iPad sales would reach about 68 million this year, which is down from the 74 million units sold in 2013.
Jeff Orr, ABO’s senior practice director, said, “Historically, Apple has counted approximately 35 percent of its iPad sales in the last calendar quarter of the year. Unless Apple can pull off a 32-plus million-unit quarter, sales for CY2014 will be down for the first year since the iPad launched.”
Apple is not alone to see decline in the sales as many tech bigwigs are expected to witness the similar fate for their products. Some of them include Amazon, Google and Barnes & Noble. All the companies are expected to post declines year-over-year in their branded tablet unit volume.
Second-largest tablet vendor Samsung is expected to ship nearly 43 million tablets in the year 2014. This is far better than the 38 million units shipped in 2013. On the other hand, companies like ASUS, Acer, Dell, HP, LG, Lenovo and Microsoft are also expected to end higher the year higher.
If the operating systems of the tablets are compared, Android continues to gain higher share with an estimated 54 percent of branded tablets like the Google OS this year. iOS is likely to see 41 percent decline, while Windows 8 is expected to trail at 5 percent of shipments.
According to the research company, the overall sales of the tablet are expected to grow some 16 percent year-over-year to 194 million next year. The growth trend is likely to continue over the next five years with a projection of around 290 million tablet shipments in the year 2019.
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