Android takes 41% of global tablet market share, trails iOS by 16%

More numbers keep flying in for this years OEMs with profit reports, market share reports and other little goodies here and there. While Samusng appears to be killing the rest of the OEMs in terms of smartphone shipments and profits, this may not be the case for tablets.

Strategy Analytics has crunched some numbers and come up with the following.

While it is quite clear that Apple are leading the way, Peter King, Director at Strategy Analytics was decidedly disappointed in Apple’s shipments. While they jumped from 11.1 million to 14 million year over year, this wasn’t a great enough increase. This is compared to Android’s jump from 5 million to 10.2 million shipments, indicating that Apple’s improvement was minor compared to the little green man’s. Here’s what Mr. King said:

Apple shipped a disappointing 14.0 million iPads worldwide and captured 57 percent share in the third quarter of 2012, dipping from 64 percent a year ago. Apple’s slowdown allowed the Android community to make gains and Android’s global share of the tablet market now stands at a record 41 percent.

The research takes note that while Android is sitting nicely at 41%, no single OEM holds a number at all close to Apple’s dominance. While the Nexus 7 has reportedly been selling like hot cakes, we can also expect the Kindle Fire (HD) to have taken a large chunk of that percentage with Samsung’s Galaxy Note 10.1 and ASUS’ Infinity Pad also contributing. Neil Mawston, Executive Director at Strategy Analytics, said:

No single Android vendor comes close to Apple in volume terms at the moment, but the collective weight of dozens of hardware partners, such as Asus, Samsung and Nook, is helping Google’s Android platform to register a growing presence in tablets.

It’s also worth nothing that year over year the total growth in the tablet mark has drastically fallen. From Q3 2010 to Q3 2011 there was a 288.6% growth in the market, while from Q3 2011 to Q3 2012 there has only been a 43.4% growth. While this could be accounted to many things like a lack of interest in tablets, it is most likely that economic difficulties has held back people from purchasing the pleasure device of a tablet.

Source: Strategy Analytics