Fourth quarter “promising” for tablet sales
 

A market research firm said that 40 million tablets will ship worldwide in this, the fourth quarter of 2015.

ABI Research said last quarter 30.6 million branded tablets shipped, but described this quarter as promising, with units accounting for 29 percent of the total volume in 2015.

Nevertheless, the fourth quarter will be down 19.7 percent compared to the same quarter last year.

Jeff Orr, a research director at ABI, said: “Vendors are hoping to gain back some of their unit and revenue shortfall from earlier in 2015. New tablets from Amazon and others will utilise a low cost approach to achieve this strategy.”

Orr numbers the vendors as Apple, Samsung, Lenovo, Huawei and Asus, in order. But the biggest gains during the quarter were made by Lenovo and Asus.

The biggest vendor losers during the quarter will be Apple and Microsoft – the former fell eight percent during the first nine months of 2015. Microsoft lost over half of its market share in the previous 90 days as it moved from the Surface Pro 3 to the Surface Pro 4.

http://www.techeye.net/news/fourth-q...r-tablet-sales