Tablet PC market ice Fire Double day: ipad weak small manufacturers rise

The ipad's lead has been scaled down. While Apple's ipad sales have fallen for two consecutive quarters and the overall tablet market has been sluggish this year, data from IDC, the US market research firm, released in Thursday showed a year-on-year increase of 11% per cent in global tablet shipments to 49.3 million units in the second quarter, Growth is much higher than the 3.2% in the first quarter. Although growth in the tablet market has accelerated, it is still well below the 52% per cent end of last year, IDC said. IDC still expects tablet sales to grow much faster this year than last year. However, the market still has a bright spot for growth and comes mainly from some of the less-well-known tablet makers, who appear to be eroding the share of high-end manufacturers such as Apple and Samsung. Other manufacturers listed in IDC grew 33.4% per cent in the second quarter of this year, to 21.4 million, with a record 44.4% per cent in overall market share, well above 34.2% in the first quarter. In contrast, Apple's shipments fell 9.3% per cent to 13.3 million units in the last quarter, with a market share of nearly 27%. Samsung's second-largest shipments grew only 1.6%, and Acer plunged 36.3%. Other manufacturers include so-called white-label manufacturers, many of which produce OEM Android tablets for other companies. White-label manufacturers are mainly concentrated in Shenzhen, China, but in addition to local sales in China, will also be shipped to overseas markets. Many of these tablets are priced at less than 100 dollars, while the lowest-priced Apple ipad sells up to $299. While the tablet market has been dominated by ARM architecture, Intel is trying to cater to Shenzhen suppliers and plans to install the chips into 4000 Tablet PCs by 2014. The company said last week that it was still sticking to the target, with a second-quarter installed capacity of about 10 million units. In addition to other manufacturers, Lenovo's second-quarter tablet computer performance was also quite surprising. The company's quarterly Tablet PC shipments surged 64.7%, ranking third in the world by 4.9% per cent.