Data out from the IDC today verifies what we’ve all known for a while now, nobody is buying tablets.

The data takes a look at shipments in the tablet market for the final quarter of 2016 as well as the tablet market as a whole for 2016.

Globally speaking, shipments of tablets declined 15.6% year-on-year and senior research analyst at IDC, Nakul Dogra has a simple explanation for why the market is diving.

“Tasks that were previously performed on tablets are increasingly moving to bigger-screen smartphones, so tablets are becoming redundant in the consumer ecosystem of gadgets,” explains Dogra.

This global decline is mirrored in the Africa and Middle East regions which only saw 13.8 million tablets shipped to the region. Bear in mind that this doesn’t mean that stock was sold but rather that it was delivered.

The research analyst goes to say, “Consumers are now investing more time and money into smartphones than tablets, which has led to a slowdown of tablet markets around the world, not just here in MEA.”

Another factor that might be stopping folks from upgrading their tablet is a lack of innovation. Think about the last tablet that did something truly incredible? Now think of the last smartphone you heard about that did something really ground-breaking.

This stagnation means fewer people see a reason to upgrade their current slate.

For those curious about which brands are doing well in the tablet market, Samsung still has the lion’s share of the market at 17.6% of units shipped. Lenovo takes second place with 10.8% of the market share and Apple has just 8.7% of the market in Africa.

The IDC forecasts that the tablet market isn’t out of the woods just yet with tablet shipments to decline by 8.1% year-on-year in 2017 and declines continuing all the way to 2021 at a compound annual growth rate of -0.2%.

[Image – CC BY SA 2.0 Esther Vargas]