IDG Says Q4 Made Up 55% of Global Tablet PC Market Share Last Year

March 14 News, IDC, a market research company, today released a data report on tablet shipments in the fourth quarter of 2011. The report shows that Apple occupies a 54.7% share of the tablet PC market, a decrease of 6.8 percentage points from 61.5% in the previous quarter. Correspondingly, Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet market share rose to 16.8%.

Although shipments of the iPad have declined month-on-month, they still increased by 110.5% compared to the same period last year.

Due to the strong performance of the Kindle Fire, the share of the Adnroid tablet rose from 32.3% to 44.6%, and Apple's iOS system together accounted for 99.3% of the tablet market share. RIM's BlackBerry operating system tablet accounts for about 0.7% of the share, and HP's weobOS system tablet is negligible.

IDC predicts that Android will surpass iOS in 2015 in platform theory; however, based on vendor branding, the advantages of Apple's iPad will continue into 2016 and may continue.