Apple led the tablet market again although it was Lenovo that showed the largest growth last quarter

We saw it coming early last year. The pandemic was creating whole new markets for the Apple iPad with those working from home using the tablet to take care of business. Kids were using the device to attend virtual school from home, and at the end of the day, both parents and their children put away their work and used the iPad to play mobile games. During Apple's fiscal second-quarter (aka the calendar first quarter) which ran from January through March of this year, iPad revenue rose a stunning 79% year-over-year.

During Apple's fiscal third-quarter earnings report (aka the calendar second quarter), which was just announced earlier this week, the annual gain in iPad revenue declined to 11%. Despite the fall-off in gross, the iPad remained the world's top tablet based on global shipments during the quarter that ended June 30th. According to IDC estimates, 12.9 million iPad units were delivered during the three months compared to the 12.5 million shipped a year ago.

Even though Apple's iPad shipments rose by 3.5% year-over-year during the second quarter, its market share of the global tablet market still declined to 31.9% from 32.1%. That happened because Apple's growth trailed the growth of the entire tablet market during the quarter, which weighed in at 4.2%.

In second place during the quarter was Samsung as IDC said that the Korean electronics powerhouse shipped 8 million tablets from March through June topping last year's Q2 figure by one million slates (or 13.3%). Samsung's share of the tablet market for the quarter came in at 19.6%, up from the 18% it had during the same quarter last year. Lenovo was estimated to have the strongest annual year-over-year gain of 64.5% as it reportedly shipped 4.7 million tablets during the second quarter compared to the 2.9 million it delivered during the same period in 2020.

Amazon had a strong 20.3% year-over-year gain in tablet shipments from 3.6 million in 2020 to 4.3 million this year based on IDC's estimates. Not including tablets produced last year by its now jettisoned Honor sub-unit, Huawei was fifth with IDC's estimated tablet sales tumbling 53.7% from 4.5 million to 2.1 million. The beleaguered manufacturer controlled 5.1% of the global tablet market for the quarter based on these figures.

If you include Honor's 2020 Q2 tablet shipments of approximately 400,000 units, IDC reports that Huawei saw a higher 57.5% decline in deliveries during this year's second quarter. Over the three months, a total of 40.5 million slates were shipped compared to the 38.9 million delivered during the same April through June period last year. Again, these are figures estimated by IDC.