Almost 300 million units will be shipped this year

Feb 3, 2014 15:17 GMT  ·  By

Smartphones may be steadily eating away at the market share of desktop PCs, but so are tablets, and they will actually rise in sales quite a bit this year.

That's what analyst firm IHS / iSuppli believes at any rate.

According to preliminary financial and shipment reports, around 299.7 million units will be shipped in 2014. That's a 23% increase.

Moving forward, shipments will go up by another 18% in 2015, so that they exceed 400 million by 2016.

Samsung, Qualcomm, NVIDIA and even Intel will mostly dominate the market, making the prospects of newer, smaller chip makers rather hopeless.

China-based processor makers might still manage it though, because they have an “astute handle on costs and the capability to produce turnkey chip solutions ready for deploying in any number of generic white-box tablets,” according to Gerry Xu, senior analyst for processor research at IHS.