YouGov and iPads: when 'market share' doesn't tell the whole story
Data about tablet ownership comparing the first quarter of 2013 with the year-ago period shows Apple's 'market share' slipping by ten points. But what happened to the installed base?
Apple's iPad mini and its newer iPad. UK buyers seem to like them. Photograph: Kimihiro Hoshino/AFP/Getty Images
"Market share" remains one of the most misunderstood measures in business - and the hardest to comprehend, especially in fast-growing markets.
There's a terrific instance of this in the latest YouGov figures about tablet ownership. It compares tablet ownership in the UK in the first quarter of 2012 with that in the first quarter of 2013.
Unsurprisingly, given that at the start of 2012 you couldn't buy a Google Nexus 7, nor (in the UK) an Amazon Kindle Fire, it finds that ownership of those tablets has shot up.
So here's the raw chart. It shows that iPad share of ownership has dropped from 73% to 63%, and that Amazon and Google both have gone from 0% to 5%. And Samsung (which has had "buy a phone, get a free tablet" schemes with some carriers) goes from 4% to 10%.
Only one message to take from that: Apple is dooooomed. Amirite?
Here's the same chart, rendered slightly differently, but normalised again to the 100% mark. Look! Apple's number is down! Doomed!
YouGov UK tablet ownership share, 1Q 12 - 1Q 13. Normalised to 100%
YouGov certainly seems to think Apple is doooomed. In its press release about the findings, it comments that
"This decline in market share comes despite the recent releases of its 4th generation iPad and iPad Mini."
We'll come to that "despite".
YouGov continues:
The main reason for this slump in share is the emergence of quality competitors. Samsung has more than doubled its share of the UK tablet market in the past year, improving from 4% in Q1 2012 to 10% in Q1 2013.
OK, it's improved its share.. can you see where we're heading yet?
There's also some useful qualitative data:
Consumers rate the Korean company's Galaxy product equal to iPads in terms of quality (except in relation to the iPad Mini).
It turns out the qualitative data favours the latter:The good news for Apple is that three months after its UK launch, the iPad Mini enjoyed a 4% market share and generates the highest satisfaction score overall and across eight of the nine quality attributes.
So Samsung owners rate their tablets as equal to the big iPad, but it scores less well than the mini. Fair enough.Now it might seem like this is all sewn up, except for one other - and very important - detail. Ownership of tablets rose dramatically over the period under discussion. In fact it nearly quadrupled. That does strange things to "market share" commentaries.
In the first quarter of 2012, 5% of UK adults owned (or laid claim to) a tablet. By the first quarter of 2013, that had gone up to just under 18% - which translates into more than 8 million adults.
When you're talking about a population of 47m adults aged over 18 (as YouGov is; data from the Office for National Statistics) that makes a very substantial difference. It turns out that 63% of 18% of 47m (the number of iPads) is very much bigger than 73% of 5% of 47m.
In fact, the number of iPads owned by adults in the UK actually went up from 1.96m to 5.3m. That's an increase of 3.34m.
(In that, iPad minis were 4% of the entire market; so a product which a number of people feel is too pricey, when marketed against the substantially cheaper Amazon Kindle Fire and Google Nexus 7, managed to be 2 out of every 7 sales - because the iPad mini is 4%, Nexus 7 is 5%, and Kindle Fire is 5%. That's pretty remarkable, and gives the iPad mini 336,000 UK users.)
Meanwhile the rest of the market went up by a total of 2.48m. Here's how that looks:
YouGov UK tablet installed base change from 1Q 2012 to 1Q 2013 In other words, in losing 10% of share, Apple actually increased its lead in the market. It has more than 5m tablets in use in the UK, while its nearest competitor, Samsung, has about 840,000.
The biggest real success - apart from the iPad - in this is "other", which grew by 890,000, though it's surely made up of lots of very cheap tablets. (It's not clear whether YouGov or its sample class Microsoft's Surface RT as a tablet, but it probably won't make too much of a dent in the figures even if it does.)
The numbers are below in case you want to check the calculation.
Yougov tablet share and ownership
share figures in %; absolute figures in millions
And what is YouGov's conclusion? John Gilbert, Consulting Director of YouGov Technology & Telecoms, says: "With a growing market, greater competition and falling prices, Apple was bound to lose some share. However, it is not simply a matter of inexpensive products flooding the market. It seems that Apple no longer has a monopoly on the 'premium' share as other brands emerge with near-equal satisfaction scores. Given the market's current expectations and considerations in purchasing tablets, we anticipate Apple to lose additional share throughout the coming year to Samsung, Google and Amazon."
One has to say that if the market continues to grow at that pace, then Apple can probably bear to "lose share" in this way - as long as it means that it's increasing its installed base faster than all of its rivals put together.
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• It sports 8.1 MP rear camera with R imaging technology.
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