(MENAFN- Khaleej Times)Holiday purchases and aggressive end-of-year promotions spurred a particularly strong performance in the consumer segment.
Fouad Charakla a researchmanager at IDC Middle East Africa and Turkey.
Dubai — Middle East and Africa or MEA tablet market recorded robustyear-on-year growth in the final quarter of 2014 with holidaypurchases and aggressive end-of-year promotions spurring aparticularly strong performance in the consumer segment.
The latestfigures released on Monday by global advisory services firmInternational Data Corporation or IDC show that the overall MEAtablet market grew 26.1 per cent year on year in Q4 2014 to total 4.43million units with the activities of several Far East manufacturersspurring significant annual growth in shipments of Android (33 percent) and Windows (131 per cent) tablets.
“The telco channel experienced its highest ever rate of growth duringthe final quarter of 2014” says Victoria Mendes a research analystat IDC Middle East Africa and Turkey. “There are a couple of reasonsbehind this growth – in South Africa Vodacom one of the biggesttelecom operators in the country introduced its own tablet andshipped approximately 170000 units during the quarter while in
Turkey local vendor Casper shipped around 100000 tablets through thetelco channel.”
Year-on-year growth of 16 per cent saw Samsung continue as the leadingvendor in MEA with the Korean giant shipping a total of 886000 unitsto the region in Q4 2014. And despite suffering a decline of 11 percent Apple retained second place in the market with shipmentstotaling 580000 units.
Lenovo remained in third position but withyear-on-year unit growth of 100 per cent and volumes totaling 572000units for the quarter the vendor is extremely likely to overtakeApple at some point during 2015. Asus maintained its fourth positiondespite shipments falling seven per cent to 206000 units whileTurkish vendor Casper increased its shipments 80 per cent to 180000units on the back of strong growth in the consumer and educationsegments.
“Moving forward the MEA tablet market is expected to see asignificant slowdown in growth” says Fouad Charakla a researchmanager at IDC Middle East Africa and Turkey. “This has becomeparticularly evident since the start of the new year with the MEAmarket set to experience its first ever quarter-on-quarter decline inQ1 2015 amid intensifying competition from smartphones and phablets.
Nevertheless the MEA tablet market is still forecast to postdouble-digit growth for 2015 as a whole while other regions aroundthe world will experience much bigger slowdowns or even declines. Theconsumer segment will remain the major contributor to this growth butwe also expect to see a huge contribution from the commercial segmentin 2015 with education deals being a major driver.”
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