Following the declining shipments trend of the worldwide smartphone market, the worldwide market for Chromebooks and tablets recorded a decline of 29.8% YoY and 9.4% YoY respectively during Q3 2021. In a report released by the International Data Corporation, the amount of Chromebooks shipped were 6.5 million units while the amount of tablets shipped were 42.3 million units.
Within the Chromebook market, Lenovo shipped the highest volume with 1.5 million shipments. They were followed by Acer and Dell, who had 1.4 million and 1.2 million units shipped respectively. Samsung, who came in fifth, was the only brand that had a growth of 0.2% YoY after shipping 0.6 million units.
Apple continued its longtime lead in the tablet market, shipping 14.7 million units during Q3 2021 and enjoyed a market share of 34.6 %. Samsung came in second place with 7.5 million units shipped, followed by Amazon with 4.7 million units shipped. Lenovo came in 5th place with 4.3 million units and Huawei came in with 2.3 million units.
Commenting on the market, Anuroopa Nataraj, senior research analyst with IDC’s Mobility and Consumer Device Trackers said:
Many schools and governments blew out their budgets to provide devices for remote learning and even consumers aggressively purchased devices for learning in 2020. As a result, some saturation in the education market is expected in the near term. This directly impacts Chromebooks and even tablets to some extent, especially in developed markets such as the U.S. and Western Europe, due to high volumes in the preceding quarters. However, Chromebooks continue to increase their footprint in emerging markets such as Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan and China), Latin America, and the Middle East & Africa, but sales in these regions account for less than 13% of the overall Chromebook volume and hence are far from moving the global market.