Tablet Sales in India – An Overview!

How many tablets are sold in India? The answer largely varies.

There could be anywhere between 1 lakh tablets to half a million tablets, though half a million seems a little far fetched. We can never get the exact sales figures, but we can try to get close to the reality. Research firms like CyberMedia Research are trying to help us.

As per the CyberMedia Research recent figures, 158,000 tablets were sold between Oct 2010 and June 2011 (3 quarters).

That translates to 17,000 to 18,000 tablets being sold every month.  Of which Samsung sold 46% of the tablets, Blackberry surprisingly sold 21% of the tablets and Apple sold 18% of the tablets. The rest of the tablet makers grab the remaining 15% of the share -that includes Olive Telecom which introduced India’s first tablet.

All’s well right? With that little graph. Except that all’s not well.

CMRI has released sales figures for India’s tablets just a month back. As per that release, 85000 tablets were sold between Nov 2010 and March 2011 and Samsung had 84.7% share, Apple 5.9% share and Olive has 8.2% share. Blackberry did not even exist, rightly so because its Playbook wasn’t launched in that period.

If we overlap both the reports, as both are from the same source, we will find some anomalies.

• Samsung share dropped from 84.7% to 46% : Now between the two reports there is a difference of 4 months. The latest report includes an extra month of October in 2010 and an extra quarter in 2011. Samsung sold 71995 tablets in the period of Nov 2010 to March 2011. And it sold 72680 tablets in the period of October 2010 to June 2011. Which means in 4 months – October 2010 and between April 2011-June 2011, Samsung sold just 685 tablets. It is even more surprising because Samsung started its ad campaign for its Galaxy Tabs in this quarter.
• Blackberry didn’t figure in the first study. Whatever sales it made has to be come from the quarter of Apr 2011 to June 2011. A total of 33180 Blackberry Playbook’s were sold in this period. It’s a good number, but when compared with iPad sales, Playbook numbers are unsurprisingly high.
• Apple sold 5015 iPads in the period of Nov 2010 to March 2011. Assuming there are no sales in October 2010, Apple sold 23425 tablets in the period of April 2011 to June 2011, the same period in which Blackberry sold 33180 Playbooks.
• If we overlap the numbers from the both the reports, even if Olive didn’t sell one Olivepad in the last quarter, it will still have 4.4% market share based on its sales in Nov 2010 to March 2011.

Samsung selling 685 tablets in 4 months, Blackberry selling more tablets than Apple are defying conventional wisdom. I need something more than this to convince me that these numbers aren’t total hokum.

The report also projects a total of 275,000 tablets to be sold in 2011, but I’m in no mood to talk about that.

[This post has been reproduced from our sister blog The Gadget Fan for benefit of trak.in readers]