Government Buying Boosts Tablet Sales in India: CMR

Thanks to government buying, the sale of tablet PCs in India rose marginally in 2015 with 4.4 million devices sold across the country - registering a growth of 13 percent over 2014, a report said on Wednesday.

According to the "India Annual Tablet PC Market Review, CY 2015" by market research firm CyberMedia Research (CMR), Samsung, Datawind and Micromax took the top three leadership positions in the tablet PC market in 2015.

"The marginal rise in tablet performance could be attributed to a few government deals. However, with the rising demand for phablets/ smartphones, the challenge for the industry would be to make it more exciting and bring in features attracting consumer segment especially, which should be other than the screen size," said Tanvi Sharma, analyst for tablet devices at CMR, in a statement.

The appetite for cellular access devices is increasing in India where three of the four devices sold in 2015 were supporting cellular internet access technologies.

The uptake of 4G-enabled tablets is also on the rise with a little over seven percent of the total tablets shipped supporting 4G, the report found. It said 4G tablets formed 9 percent of the total Tablets shipped.

iPad sales dipped 22 percent in units while Android was still the "default" OS choice with 92 percent share. Windows rose by one percent at three percent.

"The trend could be seen shifting towards convertibles tablets that come with a detached keyboard. At the same time, price sensitive consumers are resorting to sub-5k band instead of 5k-10k tablets, which was the trend last year," Sharma said.