Giving another indication of digital adoption, the tablet market in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region has bucked all global trends, posting a year-on-year growth of 3.3 percent, according to International Data Corporation’s ‘Middle East and Africa Quarterly Tablet Tracker’.
The report shows that the worldwide tablet market suffered a decline of 9.1 percent over the same period, with the steady growth seen in MEA largely driven by the strong performance of detachable devices.
While detachable tablets currently account for just a small fraction of total tablet shipments in the MEA region, their share of the market is growing. Detachable shipments grew 167.1 percent year on year in Q3 2015 and IDC expects these devices to make up 10.2 per cent of the market by the end of 2019.
“Bigger-screen smartphones continue to cannibalize demand for slate tablets. However, the decline is being offset by the strong performance of detachable tablets, which in turn are cannibalizing demand for notebooks,” commented Nakul Dogra, Senior Research Analyst, IDC.
In terms of vendor rankings, Samsung continued to lead the MEA tablet market in Q3 2015 with 24.0 percent share on the back of year-on-year growth of 3.5 percent. Lenovo placed a distant second with 13.0 percent share and 6.0 percent growth, while Apple retained its third spot with 10.9 per cent share despite suffering a year-on-year decline of 18.2 per cent. Fourth-placed Huawei posted growth of 215.2 percent and saw its share of the MEA market increase to 5.9 percent.