Galaxy Tab 3
Samsung Electronics has sold over 10 million tablet PCs in the third quarter this year for the first time in its history. It broke the 20% mark in terms of the global market share to nip at the heels of Apple.
US-based market research firm Strategy Analytics announced on November 19 that Samsung Electronics sold 10.5 million tablet PCs in Q3. Its tablet PC sales volume was 16.6 million units in the entire year of 2013 and reached 8.4 million units in Q2, 2013. In short, the volume increased 25% in just a quarter. The cumulative sales volume for the first three quarters of this year added up to 28 million units, and its market share rose to 20.2%. The percentage stood at 9.7% last year and 16.9% in Q2 this year.
In the meantime, Apple sold 14.1 million units of iPads in the third quarter, 0.5 million down from the previous quarter. Its market share dropped by 2.1 percentage points to 27.1%, too.
The market share gap between the two is 6.9 percentage points for now, significantly less than the 28.8 percentage points last year and 12.3 percentage points in the second quarter of 2013. This is the first time that the gap fell to a single digit. If this pace continues, Samsung Electronics is likely to become the number one tablet PC seller in the global market before the end of next year.
They were followed by Asus (3.5 million units, 6.8%), Lenovo (2.3 million, 4.4%) and Amazon (1.5 million, 2.8%). The global total sales volume for Q3 was 51.97 million units.