Five quarters of increasing growth accelerated by remote work and learning has finally ceased, with global shipments of Chromebooks and tablets suffering their first decline since the start of the pandemic.
Chromebook shipments declined 29.8 per cent year-over-year, during the September quarter, with only 6.5 million units able to get from the factory to the store.
Tablet shipments dropped to 42.3 million units, a fall of 9.4 per cent year-on-year.
This is according to preliminary data from the International Data Corporation Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker.
“Many schools and governments blew out their budgets to provide devices for remote learning and even consumers aggressively purchased devices for learning in 2020. As a result, some saturation in the education market is expected in the near term,” said Anuroopa Nataraj, senior research analyst with IDC’s Mobility and Consumer Device Trackers.
“This directly impacts Chromebooks and even tablets to some extent, especially in developed markets such as the U.S. and Western Europe, due to high volumes in the preceding quarters.
“However, Chromebooks continue to increase their footprint in emerging markets such as Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan and China), Latin America, and the Middle East & Africa, but sales in these regions account for less than 13 per cent of the overall Chromebook volume and hence are far from moving the global market.”
