PC Can’t Stop the Explosion of Tablet PC

Global tablet applications processor market showed a robust 77% year-on-year growth in the third quarter of 2012, reaching $0.9 billion, according to market research firm Strategy Analytics.

In 2012, given the weak global economic situation and the corresponding limitation of consumers’ spending in PC as well as the rapid development of mobile devices, worldwide PC industry suffered the first decline since 2001; even in the holiday season, global PC shipments only totaled 89.8 million units, down 6.4% compared to the same quarter in 2011 and worse than the forecast decline of 4.4 percent. As such, the Q4 in 2012 marked the first time in more than five years that the PC market has seen a year-on-year decline during the holiday season, said market research firm of IDC.

Touch screen, despite the inconvenience of typing something which sometimes would cause rampant typos, has undoubtedly become the trends for mobile devices including smartphone and Tablet PC. The screen used in the Wins 8 also proves this inevitable fact. In addition, due to the portable advantage along with thin and light body, Tablet PC will continue to see high-speed development and strong penetration. Although, the main use of Tablet PC is for entertainment, after a day of work in company, there is no denying people should be attached to entertainment, which definitely promotes the acceptance of Tablet PC. Furthermore, with more and more tablets such as Amazon’s Kindle and Google Nexus series entering market, the price cutting of Tablet PC also boosts the development of Tablet PC, and dampens the PC industry. According to NPD Displaysearch, Tablet PC will ship more than Notebook in 2013.

In terms of Tablet processor in 2012, Apple maintained its lead in the tablet applications processor market with 53 percent revenue share in Q3 2012. NVIDIA, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm and Samsung made up the rest of the top-five vendors.

iPad mainly contributed the result of Apple, while NVIDIA dominated the non-iPad tablet market with one-third unit shipment share in Q3 2012 with the help of its Google Nexus 7 and Microsoft Surface RT design-wins. During the quarter, NVIDIA registered its highest quarterly Tegra tablet processor shipments since the introduction of the Tegra product. Strategy Analytics believes that NVIDIA is well-positioned to maintain its share in non-iPad tablets in the next few quarters.

Then, Strategy Analytics also said stand-alone applications processors accounted for about 99% of all tablet applications processors shipped in Q3 2012. Baseband-integrated processors have had limited traction so far in tablets and this has affected shipments of integrated vendors such as Qualcomm, Broadcom and MediaTek.