Apple Inc’s share of the market for tablet computers fell to 50 percent in the third quarter as the iPad faced more competition from Android devices such as Samsung Electronic Co’s Galaxy tablets and Google Inc’s Nexus 7.
Apple still had a solid lead and shipped more iPads worldwide than a year earlier, Monday’s study by IDC showed. Apple had no new tablets out in the third quarter and also might have seen sales slow amid expectations of a smaller iPad.
Apple could regain share in the holiday quarter with last Friday’s release of new iPad devices, including the iPad Mini. The company on Monday said that it sold 3 million iPads of all kinds through the weekend, double the 1.5 million iPads sold in the first three days after Apple launched the third-generation iPad in March and cut the price of the iPad 2.
However, the company will face competition from new devices from Amazon.com Inc, Google and others over the next few weeks.
From July to September, Apple shipped 14 million devices, up 26 percent from 11 million a year ago. Its market share fell from 60 percent in the third quarter of last year as the overall tablet market grew by 50 percent to nearly 28 million.
Samsung’s market share grew to 18 percent from about 7 percent, as it more than quadrupled the number of tablets shipped to 5.1 million. The quarter saw the release of the Galaxy Note 10.1.
Amazon was third in the report with its Kindle Fire, which had a 9 percent market share. Amazon did not release a new version until late in the quarter, but it had nothing in the third quarter of last year because the Fire was not released until November that year, after the quarter ended. Amazon managed a 9 percent worldwide share even though the Fire was available only in the US during the third quarter.
No. 4 tablet maker Asustek Computer Inc (華碩), which makes the Nexus 7 for Google, saw its shipments more than triple to 2.4 million. It had a market share of 8.6 percent, up from 3.8 percent.
“Competitors are turning up the pressure on market leader Apple,” said Ryan Reith, a program manager for mobile devices at IDC.
Lenovo Group Ltd (聯想) was ranked fifth in the IDC report with 400,000 shipments and 1.4 percent market share.
TECH TITAN: Pandemic-era demand for semiconductors turbocharged the nation’s GDP per capita to surpass South Korea’s, but it still remains half that of Singapore Taiwan is set to surpass South Korea this year in terms of wealth for the first time in more than two decades, marking a shift in Asia’s economic ranks made possible by the ascent of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電). According to the latest forecasts released on Thursday by the central bank, Taiwan’s GDP is expected to expand 4.55 percent this year, a further upward revision from the 4.45 percent estimate made by the statistics bureau last month. The growth trajectory puts Taiwan on track to exceed South Korea’s GDP per capita — a key measure of living standards — a
Samsung Electronics Co shares jumped 4.47 percent yesterday after reports it has won approval from Nvidia Corp for the use of advanced high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, which marks a breakthrough for the South Korean technology leader. The stock closed at 83,500 won in Seoul, the highest since July 31 last year. Yesterday’s gain comes after local media, including the Korea Economic Daily, reported that Samsung’s 12-layer HBM3E product recently passed Nvidia’s qualification tests. That clears the components for use in the artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators essential to the training of AI models from ChatGPT to DeepSeek (深度求索), and finally allows Samsung
READY TO HELP: Should TSMC require assistance, the government would fully cooperate in helping to speed up the establishment of the Chiayi plant, an official said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said its investment plans in Taiwan are “unchanged” amid speculation that the chipmaker might have suspended construction work on its second chip packaging plant in Chiayi County and plans to move equipment arranged for the plant to the US. The Chinese-language Economic Daily News reported earlier yesterday that TSMC had halted the construction of the chip packaging plant, which was scheduled to be completed next year and begin mass production in 2028. TSMC did not directly address whether construction of the plant had halted, but said its investment plans in Taiwan remain “unchanged.” The chipmaker started
‘COMPLEMENTARY’: The company unveiled its new Dimensity 9500 smartphone chip, which would power Vivo’s X300 series, set to launch in Taiwan in November MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s largest handset chip designer, yesterday said its strategic collaboration with Nvidia Corp is on track and expected to bear fruit within two to three years, easing concerns over Nvidia’s newly announced partnership with Intel Corp to develop PC chips. MediaTek shares fell 2.43 percent to NT$1,405, underperforming the TAIEX’s 1.18 percent gain, as investors worried that Nvidia’s work with Intel might overshadow its joint PC-chip projects with MediaTek based on Arm Holdings PLC’s architecture. “We are quite complementary to one another in terms of product and technology,” MediaTek president Joe Chen (陳冠州) told reporters during the launch
RSS