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World tablet shipments to cross 269 mn units by 2019: IDC

Demand from the commercial sector will be the main driver for tablet PCs globally and shipments are estimated to cross 269 million units by 2019, research firm IDC said.

Worldwide shipment of tablets is expected to reach 234.5 million units this year, a modest year-on-year increase of 2.1 per cent from 2014, and touch 269.4 million units by 2019, it said.

The shipments fell 3.2 per cent to 76.1 million units in the fourth quarter of 2014, the first ever year-on-year decline since the market's inception in 2010. Although the outlook has been tempered, IDC still expects low but positive growth for the market in the years to come as demand in the commercial sector increases, and as Microsoft slowly gains a foothold, it said. "Despite the growing popularity of phablets, there still remains a portion of the market that wants to use a larger device so they can tailor their experience to the appropriate screen size," IDC Senior Research Analyst (Worldwide Quarterly Tablet Tracker) Jitesh Ubrani said.

Meanwhile, an increasing number of vendors behind small tablets are reducing prices and adopting features like voice calling to entice consumers to purchase their products over competing phablets (5.5-6.99 inch screen size), he added.

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