Samsung is starting to look like a real threat for Apple in the thriving tablet market

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Samsung is starting to look like a real threat for Apple in the thriving tablet market
If the smartphone market performed slightly better than expected in Q3 2020, declining just a little over 1 percent in global shipments compared to the same period of last year, tablets had an absolutely tremendous quarter, actually growing in popularity due to the coronavirus-related challenges faced by so many people of late.

All in all, 47.6 million tablets were sold around the world between July and September, marking a 24.9 percent improvement from a 38.1 million unit tally in Q3 2019. Unsurprisingly, Apple continues to dominate the vendor chart, followed by Samsung, which was ranked third this time last year, gaining no less than 4.4 million unit sales in the past 12 months.

Believe it or not, that equates to an 89.2 percent year-over-year surge for the industry's new silver medalist, which appears to have found great success with the high-end Galaxy Tab S7 duo. While we wouldn't say Apple is in any real danger of being overtaken in the very near future by its Korea-based arch-rival, the latter's incredible recent progress must be causing at least a little concern in the Cupertino camp.


After all, this was a pretty good quarter for the iPad family as well, but Apple's 2.1 million unit gains pale in comparison to the aforementioned boost in global Samsung tablet sales. In terms of market share, the world's number two vendor now sits at less than 10 percent behind the reigning king, down from a whopping 18.1 percentage points back at the end of 2019's third calendar quarter.

That's because Apple's market share has actually dipped from 31.1 to 29.2 percent, while Samsung's numbers are rising from 13 to close to 20 percent of the worldwide pie. In third place, Amazon obviously suffered from pushing Prime Day back to October, nonetheless edging out Huawei and Lenovo, both of which impressively improved their Q3 sales figures from last year.

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We're talking a 32.9 percent progress for Huawei driven by solid performances in both China and across the old continent, as well as 62.4 percent growth for Lenovo, which did an exceptionally good job of selling "budget friendly tablets with larger screen sizes." Still, Amazon didn't have such a bad quarter either, shipping well over 5 million slates worldwide, of which the recently released Fire HD 8 and Fire HD 8 Plus captured the biggest share, followed by the latest Fire HD 10 edition.

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