Research group IDC increased its forecast for tablet computer shipments this year after last year’s figures ended stronger than it had anticipated.
IDC said on Tuesday that it now expects worldwide shipments of 106 million this year, up from the previous forecast of nearly 88 million. The new figure represents 54 percent growth from nearly 69 million shipments last year.
The introduction in November last year of Amazon.com Inc’s low-cost Kindle Fire, which runs a modified version of Google Inc’s Android operating system, helped last year’s growth, IDC said.
Tom Mainelli, IDC’s research director for mobile connected devices, said he initially expected the Kindle Fire to take sales away from other Android tablets without having much of an effect on Apple Inc’s iPad. Instead, the Fire and the iPad both did well, as did other tablet computers.
“It seems all the attention that the Fire launch garnered raised awareness of media tablets in general and a great number of vendors benefited from this increased awareness,” he said.
In the fourth quarter, Apple sold 15.4 million iPads, more than double the 7.3 million sold a year earlier. Among all manufacturers, IDC says 28.2 million tablet computers were shipped in the final three months of last year, about 2.5 times the number a year earlier.
The 68.7 million tablets shipped last year represents a 9 percent increase from IDC’s forecast of 63.3 million and is about 3.5 times the 19.4 million shipped in 2010.
That’s still small compared with more than 350 million personal computers shipped last year. That number likely would have been even higher had there not been shortages of hard drives resulting from heavy flooding at manufacturing centers in Thailand.
Meanwhile, survey results released on Tuesday showed that growing numbers of businesses plan to buy iPads as tablets make their way from personal lives into workplaces.
Slightly more than one in five companies said they would buy tablets for workers by the middle of this year, with 84 percent of those purchases to be iPads, according to a ChangeWave Research poll.
The results indicated “the highest level of corporate iPad demand” ever seen in a survey by the US-based, independent research firm.
ChangeWave also found that the pending arrival of a new-generation iPad set for release tomorrow has contributed to an “across-the-board decline” in plans by companies to buy tablets made by Apple rivals.
Apple last week unveiled a 3G iPad enhanced with features aimed at keeping it on top of the booming tablet computer market.
“We think that iPad is the poster child of the post-PC world,” Apple chief executive Tim Cook said at the unveiling, noting that iPad sales topped those of any personal computer maker during the final three months of last year.
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