Worldwide tablet shipments will reach 145 million in 2013; How much will be India's share?

The rise of mobile and tablets is no big secret in this age and forecasts on sales of these devices have always been of interest. The world saw a huge spike in terms of the number of tablets sold last year; the data is still being compiled but the number is being put at 126 million tablets shipped. A new ABIresearch report forecasts that this number will rise to 145 million tablets shipped globally in 2013. A host of reasons like affordability, more players in the market and adoption rate are fueling this rise.

“The rate of innovation is slowing as tablet vendors augment their product portfolios to meet the needs of market audiences,” says senior practice director Jeff Orr. “The late 2012 launches of Apple’s iPad mini and a variety of slates based on Intel architecture and new Windows operating systems will only begin to show their progress this year.” Most of the attention for tablets is coming from North America where the outlook for 2013 has the region consuming just over 50% of worldwide shipments.

This got us wondering about the sale of tablets in India and a CyberMedia Research report estimates total shipments for the India Tablet PC market at 3 million units in 2012. This number is expected to grow by 100% and the expectation is that 6 million tablets will be sold in India during 2013, a 4.13% of the global forecast.

Within this, if we analyze the third quarter of 2012, Samsung led with a 23.9% share, followed by Micromax at second position with 15.3% share and Datawind at third position with a 12.3% share in terms of sales according to the same CyberMedia Research. The average sales value of these tablets in India was INR 13,200 and 63.5% of the tablets were of sub 10,000 range. Micromax has been closing up on Samsung and the battle between these two will be a tough one. It'll be interesting to see how they battle it out.

Looking at larger trends, 2013 will see more tablet adoption from enterprises which opens up a huge new market. It'll also be interesting to see how the Windows 8 media tablets perform as we expect a few OEMs to launch LTE-ready tablets. The space is just hotting up, stay tuned for more.