A report from Strategy Analytics this week stated that overall tablet shipments more than doubled over the holiday quarter, but the results aren’t exactly what many expected.
As Bloomberg reports, iPad shipments actually decreased from 68% to 58% during the same period, while Android leapt from 29% to 39%. Personally, I find this rather hard to swallow for a number of reasons. Let’s have a look at what’s really going on here.
Shipments vs. Sales
The first and most obvious point to make here is that shipments are not equal to actual devices sold. Strategy Analytics focuses strictly on the number of devices shipped rather than sales of devices to customers, which is a problem for a multitude of reasons, including the following:
- Tablets still sitting on shelves may still be figured into the brand’s market share.
- Devices still in distribution (sitting in warehouses) may still be figured into the brand’s market share.
- Apple typically has much lower channel inventory than most manufacturers (they sell nearly every iPad they make).
If these reasons aren’t enough to make you question the accuracy of Strategy’ Analytics numbers, then perhaps I can put it in more conceptual terms.
Imagine you’re going to hold a bake sale against another competing baker. You bake 500 cupcakes, while your competitor bakes 600. The cupcakes are then delivered to your sales table. At the end of the day, you sell most of your cupcakes, and only have 50 left. Your competitor still has over 200 left. However, since your competitor delivered 600 cupcakes to his sales table, and you only delivered 500, he declares himself the winner, having achieved more “cupcake share” than you.
Does that make any sense at all? Of course not. You sold more cupcakes. Apple sold more iPads. Counting “shipped” products towards your device’s market share is absolute nonsense, and cannot provide an accurate representation about how many people are actually purchasing one product over another.
