The Android tablet market is getting more and more lively.
2021 can be seen as a full-blown outbreak of the Android tablet market. As far as the brand is concerned, this year not only has the return of heavy products such as xiaomi tablet 5; there are also brands such as Huawei, Samsung, and Lenovo that have been insisting on the Android tablet market for many years to launch a number of products with different price points and different sizes; of course, there is also the first test of emerging manufacturers such as realme in the tablet market...
This year, the brand lineup in the tablet market seems to continue to expand. For example, the OPPO Pad to be released this week, Lenovo's upcoming savior Y700, and the vivo and iQOO tablets that have long been rumored and are expected to meet with everyone soon. For a time, in the matter of doing tablets, the mainstream mobile phone brand "all-star lineup" has basically been gathered.
Where there is demand, there is a market
Why is everyone doing tablets in one fell swoop? The reason is actually very simple: the market has demand.
This is backed by data. According to the IDC report, in 2021, the Chinese tablet market shipped about 28.46 million units, an increase of 21.8% year-on-year, the highest increase in shipments in the past 7 years. From the global tablet market data, in 2021, the total global shipments of tablet PCs increased by 2.9% year-on-year to 168 million units, the highest level since 2016.
It is well known that the Android tablet market experienced a "half-life" before 2020. The rise of large-screen mobile phones, the congenital chronic disease of Android large-screen software and hardware ecology, the lack of demand for Android tablets in the entire consumer market, and manufacturers do not have much willingness and motivation to promote the upgrading and iteration of Android tablets. Even a brand like Xiaomi, which is "selling what is hot", also "stopped" its own tablet products in 2019.
But the outbreak of the epidemic in 2020 has injected a shot in the arm for the tablet market. The demand for online entertainment, office, education and social networking at home caused by the epidemic isolation at home has made large-screen portable devices such as tablets become the darlings of the consumer market for a while. Especially in the first half of 2020, there has also been a wave of "price increases" in tablet PC products, which is also an anomaly in the field of electronic consumption in recent years.
Although the momentum of consumer demand due to the epidemic has slowed down in 2021, it is still continuing. This is also an important reason for the current year-on-year increase in shipments of the entire tablet consumer market.
The winner of the epidemic
Demand growth is one aspect, the uneven development of the tablet market itself and the change of the market competition environment, can be seen as an internal factor to promote the full return and outbreak of the current tablet market.
There is no doubt that the current tablet market iPad is still the absolute hegemon, whether it is shipments or profit margins. Globally, Apple sold a total of 57.8 million iPads in 2021, shipping more than the second and third places combined. This is an 8.4% year-on-year increase and a market share increase of 34.2%.
In contrast, Samsung ranked second, selling a total of 30.9 million units in 2021, an increase of 3.8% year-on-year and a share of 18.3%. Lenovo ranked third, selling 17.77 million units in 2021, up 19.2% year-on-year and 10.5% to market.
In other words, Apple alone accounts for about one-third of the current tablet market share. Although there are many categories of Android tablets, they occupy the mainstream of the market from the overall volume. But even for a first-line international brand like Samsung, its tablet products are still difficult to compete with the iPad.
At the same time, the tablet market is also facing some unexpected factors, such as the shrinking market share of some head brands. Still taking IDC's 2021 data as a reference, we can see that of the five top brands in the global tablet market, four are growing, and only Huawei has seen a huge decline of 32.1%.
Huawei's share of the tablet market has shrunk, and the reasons do not need to be explained too much. The lack of core caused by force majeure factors has no less impact on Huawei's tablet products than its mobile phone products. It should be known that in 2018, 2019, and 2020, Huawei can have about 15 million tablet products shipped every year. By 2021, sales of Huawei's tablet products have dropped to 9.7 million units (this data also includes the sales of some Honor brands in 2020 Q4).
Like the mobile phone market, Huawei's vacancy in the tablet market also needs to be filled by other brands. From a data point of view, Lenovo is undoubtedly the biggest winner after Huawei's shrinkage. In 2020, lenovo tablet shipments reached 14 million units, an increase of 66.4% year-on-year. In 2021, Lenovo's tablet shipments increased to 17.7 million units, an increase of 19.2% year-on-year. In terms of shipments, Lenovo has been the largest growing brand in the global tablet market for the past two years.
The recovery of demand and the new round of reshuffling of the market pattern are the current status quo of the global tablet market.
In the face of such a situation, mobile phone manufacturers, especially from China, will naturally not be willing to do "Others". So from last year, we can see that mobile phone brands have begun to develop the tablet market.
In fact, in addition to the old giants such as Apple and Samsung, in the face of the head brands of the tablet market such as Lenovo and Amazon, several mainstream Chinese mobile phone brands have certain advantages in the supply chain, technology research and development, market, channel and other aspects of tablet products.
To a large extent, tablets and current smartphones actually have a lot in common in many hardware and software technologies and solutions. For example, components such as large screen panels, batteries, speakers, and cameras can be relied on the existing smartphone supply system. In this regard, the upstream and downstream supply chains established by smartphone brands in the past decade or so can provide the most basic basic guarantee for their layout in the tablet market.
On the other hand, at the level of software and hardware solution integration and technology research and development, smart phone manufacturers have strong strength. Take the large-screen software adaptation and interaction optimization that has plagued Android tablets for many years. In recent years, technologies such as multi-task interaction, multi-screen interaction, cross-platform collaboration, and IoT Internet of Things in the field of smart phones have matured enough, and it is logical to decentralize and port them to tablet products. The addition of these new technologies and new solutions can bring more experience advantages to the Android tablet, and can also make up for some birth defects and deficiencies of the original tablet.
In addition, the user groups accumulated by mobile phone manufacturers over the years and the brand recognition they have established are more conducive to the coverage of their tablet products among their original audiences. For example, most of the previous Huawei tablet users were also Users of Huawei mobile phones or Huawei laptops.
At the experience level, only this kind of cross-device collaboration and interconnection between the same brand and the same platform can be more convenient and smooth. Like the closed ecosystem established by iOS and iPadOS, the current Android mobile phone manufacturers are also using the advantages of this function and experience to enhance the user's brand stickiness and loyalty.
Incorporating tablets into their own ecosystems is not only a way to improve user experience, but also a kind of "bundling". The "bundling" effect of this experience will prompt the original mobile phone users to naturally choose the same brand of tablet products when choosing tablets. In this way, the advantages of mobile phone manufacturers are more obvious.
Challenges in a great situation
However, it is not that the current mobile phone manufacturers are in a good situation when they do tablets, and the challenges they face cannot be ignored.
The first is that the current tablet market has become saturated, and the consumer demand spawned by the epidemic is slowing down. For most users, tablets are not a necessity. Under the condition that the core experience and application scenarios overlap with smartphones and PCs, tablets can only focus on entertainment, education, online office and other market segments. After two or three years of rapid growth, the increase brought by the epidemic to the tablet market will not last forever.
In addition, flat products are currently beginning to gradually differentiate in form and application. The most typical example is the iPad. Initially, the positioning of the tablet was actually the "third screen" between the mobile phone and the PC, and its main application scenarios were biased towards the audio-visual entertainment experience.
However, with the development of the market and product iteration, the iPad has been derived from a number of categories: the iPad mini, which focuses on small-screen portable, the iPad digital series and Air series that focus on audio-visual entertainment and light office, and the iPad Pro series that are positioned at high-end and focus on productivity attributes.
Compared with the iPad, there is still a big gap in the positioning and experience of the Android tablet. Especially in the high-end tablet market, there is no product that can compete with the iPad Pro at present. This requires mobile phone brands to balance the comprehensive product experience and user needs when defining their own tablet products.
It can be seen that several mainstream domestic mobile phone manufacturers have been listed, or the tablet products that are ready to be listed are relatively balanced in experience, and as far as possible to achieve entertainment and productivity attributes.
However, in this way, these relatively balanced tablet products are bound to face strong competition in the corresponding subdivision of tablet products of friends and giants, and lose certain experience advantages. Whether it is to make a "blockbuster" and grab a bite of the cake in the tablet market. It is still necessary to make the tablet product line as big and strong as Samsung and Huawei, and challenge the supremacy of the iPad, which is a difficult choice.
Behind this seemingly lively market, the competition and challenges faced by the tablet market may not be easy.