IDC: Smartphones Taking Share From PCs, Tablets In Connected Devices Market

Smartphones will trump other devices to make up 77.8 percent of the connected devices market in 2019, while the other product types in the connected devices market -- including PCs and tablets -- will slump, according to an IDC report released Friday,.

Analysts aren't shocked by the decline in PC market share, saying the rise in popularity of other mobile devices -- such as large-screened smartphones, or phablets -- is behind the shift.

[Related: IDC: Top 5 Vendors In Worldwide Q4 PC Shipments]

"It's not terribly surprising … the shift toward smartphones being dominant in the smart connected devices market has been playing up for a while," Tom Mainelli, program vice president for devices at IDC, told CRN. "In the last few years, sales for PCs have slowed down, primarily because tablets were impacting their purchases. Now, we're seeing tablets similarly affected by an increase in larger phones."

id
unit-1659132512259
type
Sponsored post

According to IDC, as recently as 2010 PCs made up 52.5 percent of shipments in the connected devices market, but the popularity of tablets, as well as larger smartphones, has cannibalized that number. Now, PC shares are expected to slide to 11.6 percent by 2019, down from their 16.8 percent share in 2014, while tablets will slip to 10.7 percent share in 2019 vs. their 2014 share of 12.5 percent.

Solution providers, however, remain bullish on PCs and tablets, saying that those devices will retain market share because they have separate functionalities from smartphones.

"I think that there's a place for everything … we're not getting less sales in PCs because of tablets but because of longer time between refreshes," said Alina Nunez, director of sales at Boca Raton, Fla.-based iPower Technologies, which specializes in Dell and Hewlett-Packard hardware. "I don't see a decrease on the PC sales [side]. I do think that the tablet market will continue growing in the workplace as there are more and more applications running on tablets for the enterprise."

Meanwhile, according to IDC, the overall combined connected market of smartphones, tablets, PCs and 2-in-1s will grow 6.5 percent from 2014 to 2019.

IDC's Mainelli noted that the overall connected device market will continue to transform based on the development of different levels of interoperability across Android, iOS and Windows Phone.

"I think what's most interesting with Apple in particular is that the company continues to draw bold lines around its Mac OS X platform and its iOS platform in terms of what those two OSes mean for connectivity, while Microsoft bridges this interoperability in a single OS with Windows 8, and to a lesser extent, Windows 10 for connected devices," he said. "Google has had more success around their Android platform, but also with their Chrome platform running in parallel. These three platform owners have three distinct answers to the rising popularity of interoperability among end users."

PUBLISHED MARCH 23, 2015