Tablet market grew by 20% in Q3, Apple lead narrows

A new report from IDC is out detailing the worldwide tablet shipments for the third quarter of this year (that's July to September), and the market overall grew by 20.4% reaching 39.6 million units.

As you'd probably expect, Apple still dominates, with 12.6 million units shipped and a 31.7% market share. While shipments have grown by 1.4% compared to Q3 2023, Apple's market share has actually dropped from 37.7%.

Samsung is in second with 7.1 million shipments and a 17.9% market share, having had 18.3% growth in shipments but a market share dip from 18.2% a year ago. Amazon is in third with 4.6 million shipments and 11.6% market share, thanks to a whopping 111.3% growth in shipments.

Huawei's growth is also impressive at 44.1%, now sitting at 8.2% market share after 3.3 million shipments (compared to 6.9% and 2.3 million respectively in the year-ago quarter).

Rounding off the Top 5 is Lenovo with 3 million shipments and a 7.6% market share, up from 2.6 million but down from 8% in Q3 2023.

So it looks like the big winners of this quarter were Amazon and Huawei. There's still a pretty substantial 9.1 million shipments going to other brands, which collectively have 22.9% of the pie.

IDC says Apple's new iPad Air saw boosted sales thanks to the back to school season, while the new iPad Pro performed below expectations due to pricing being too steep for emerging markets. Samsung's sales were driven by the low-end Galaxy Tab A9 series and not the premium Galaxy Tab S10+ and S10 Ultra, while Amazon's growth primarily came from Prime Day deals. Huawei's key device was the MatePad SE 11, and Lenovo's growth came from China and Western Europe.