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Amazon Now the 3rd Biggest Tablet Maker in The World

NPD Display Search has just finished a report on worldwide gadget sales in Q1 2012. Much to no one’s surprise, Apple dominated the tablet market with their usual millions of iPads sold.

The report is behind a paywall so I cannot give you all the details, but DisplaySearch did release a few bits of information. The press release covers laptops, tablets, and mobile PCs as a whole, but the only one I care about is the tablet news.

Apples' share of the world tablet market slipped to a mere 62%, with 13.6 million iPads sold. That’s a tragedy, I tell you. Why, I can remember the day when Apple had 80% of the market, or more.

Kidding aside, the rest of the top 5 comes as little surprise. Samsung continues to hold second place with 1.6 million tablets sold, while Amazon secures a 3rd place position with 900 thousand Kindle Fires sold in the US market. RIM and ASUS fill out the top 5, with around half a million each.

I’m not surprised by the Samsung-Amazon positions because we’d already gotten a hint that it would happen. Earlier this month IDG released bits and pieces of data that said much the same thing. Both IDG and DisplaySearch report Amazon as having 4% of the market.

Of course, the reports disagree on how many tablets were sold over all, as well as the number sold by Amazon and Apple, so there isn’t much that you can rely on. But I do trust the relative rankings.

First, it doesn’t matter how many iPads they sold, we know that Apple led the tablet market. That’s a given. And I’m also not surprised by Samsung beating Amazon; the only shocking part is that the margin is so small.

Amazon only sells the Kindle Fire in the US, while Samsung sells tablets in markets all over the world.  I don’t keep track of all the places, but I do follow the Samsung-Apple patent fight, which now spans a dozen countries on 5 continents.  That’s a heck of a lot larger population to sell tablets to, so it makes sense for Samsung to beat Amazon.

In the long run that margin is going to shrink. It will not happen tomorrow, but Amazon will eventually start selling the Kindle Fire outside the US. When they do, Amazon will dethrone Samsung in a day. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Amazon sell 5 million or more Kindle Fires the quarter after they start worldwide sales.

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