Samsung leads Apple over tablet sales in the Middle East

South Korea’s Samsung Electronics has once again registered a lead over rival Apple in terms of tablet shipments into the Middle East and African market, even as they face increasing competition from new and smaller players.

Latest figures released by International Data Corporation (IDC) for the second quarter of 2014 put Samsung at No. 1 with 862,000 units shipped while Apple managed to bring in 622,000 units.

In the third place is Lenovo with 420,000 units, followed by Asus at the fourth spot with a total of 284,000 units shipped in the quarter.

IDC also noted that the overall tablet shipments recorded a 2 per cent drop during the second quarter of 2014 to a total 3.95 million units.

Samsung and Apple saw their combined share market fall six percentage points to 37 per cent in Q2 2014. IDC says this trend will continue as consumers increasingly opt for the “best of both worlds” in terms of price and quality offered by the traditional PC vendors’ new releases.

“The reasons for the quarter-on-quarter decline in Q2 2014 were twofold," says Victoria Mendes, a research analyst at IDC Middle East, Turkey, and Africa. "We anticipated a slowdown in the Middle East due to the traditionally slow summer and Ramadan period, but there were also inventory pileups from the previous quarter in some parts of Africa and the Middle East, and these served to amplify the market's deceleration.”

According to Mendes, traditional PC vendors such as Lenovo, Asus, Toshiba, HP, and Acer are becoming much more aggressive in terms of their product launches and pricing strategies, resulting in a considerable shift in consumer demand.

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