NPD for the US and Context for Europe treat the iPad like the elephant in the tablet room – but careful study suggests how many Motorola Xooms and RIM PlayBooks have really sold

A quick one to think about while you work through the next couple of paragraphs: in August, Apple's share of the western European tablet market was estimated at 75.69%. Then the overall market grew by 20%. In September, Apple's share of the western European tablet was estimated to have fallen to 67.34%.

So: did Apple's actual tablet sales grow or shrink in Europe?

While you ponder that one (the answer's coming later), here's some data from Context, a European IT market research firm: in August, 7in tablets accounted for just 2% of sales volume in western Europe.

Two. Per. Cent. That's the market share for tablets including the RIM PlayBook and… all those other 7in tablets. Context says that's "more a comment on the appeal of current 7in tablets".

Which arithmetically leaves the other 98% to tablets above it in size – most likely around the 10in mark.

In fact according to Context the best-selling non-Apple tablets in the August and September period in Europe were the HP TouchPad (unsurprising, given its £99 fire sale price), the Asus Transformer and Acer Iconia Tab.

Once the TouchPad was gone (i.e. September), the Transformer and the iconia Tab remained the most popular when you exclude the iPad, according to Context.

This came in a press release which was headlined "Consumers hungry for non-Apple tablets".

That would certainly be interesting: consumers turning away from Apple's iPad, which dominated the tablet sector in 2010? Let's have a look.

But hang on – why did Context exclude the iPad? In fact on looking at the initial release, it doesn't have any figures about the iPad at all.

It's reminiscent of how in the US, NPD Group issued a rather weird press release earlier this week, in which it talked about "the tablet market apart from the iPad" (emphasis added). It also included the intriguing sentence, ascribed to Stephen Baker, VP of industry analysis at NPD, saying: "According to NPD's Consumer Tracking Service, 76% of consumers who purchased a non-Apple tablet didn't even consider the iPad, an indication that a large group of consumers are looking for alternatives, and an opportunity for the rest of the market to grow their business."

We learnt from NPD – which looked at actual shipments, rather than sales – that US tablet sales "excluding iPad sales" from January through to October totalled 1.2m units, which brought in $415m (average selling price: $346).

Ten months? 1.2m sold? That's an average of 120,000 per month, or about 4,800 per working day (since NPD measures retail) across the whole of the US. The US is a very big country.

But wait a minute. Lest we forget, NPD's study ignores the iPad, which as John Gruber pointed out probably sold about 10m units in the US during the same period, which would give it an 89% share.

In the NPD report, the biggest sellers were the TouchPad (17% of those 1.2m sales: that's 204,000 units in total), followed by Samsung (16%, 192,000 units), Asus (10%, 120,000 units), Motorola (9%, 108,000) and Acer (9%, 108,000).

(Interesting to compare that Motorola 108,000 to the total number shipped, which we found out earlier was 790,000 in all. Of course some of those – half? – would have been shipped outside the US. On that basis, as few as a quarter of the Xooms it made for the US market actually sold.)

Why does NPD ignore the iPad, though? It's the tablet that is actually selling well. Comparatively well. And as Gruber also points out, the whole "76% of consumers who purchased a non-Apple tablet didn't even consider the iPad" is a meaningless statement until you know how many consumers did buy an iPad. Then you find that it's 76% of 11%, or 8.3%. Which means that even among the people who bought a TouchPad, at least half considered the iPad first.

[Clarification: the above reference to TouchPad buyers wasn't meant to suggest that only TouchPad buyers didn't consider iPads; only to give a picture of how comparatively small the number of people who didn't consider the iPad is. I've also asked NPD for clarification about how its figure was reached, and what the margin of error was, assuming it's based on a sample.]

Clearly, people in the US who buy tablets tend to consider the iPad in their purchasing decision.

Context also didn't give figures for the iPad; something that I thought was peculiar. So why, I asked a Context representative, didn't its data talk about the iPad?

"Getting accurate data on Apple is challenging," they explained. "This is due to Apple being cagey about their data to be seen in the market, apart from what they tell the market themselves. So, while most research companies including Context can report on what they see flowing through the channels they monitor, sales going through Apple stores for example is data that Apple does not reveal."

In other words: Context – and NPD, which looks at retail channels – can't see far enough inside Apple's retail chain to know how many iPads are selling. That's a problem, obviously, for a retail analysis company. And nobody seems to have bothered to ask NPD about how many iPads it thinks were sold. (I've dropped them an email, but suspect they're closed for Thanksgiving.) On that basis, Gruber's estimate – which gives Apple 89% of the US market, where it tends to dominate – is probably close enough.

And now we turn to western Europe and Context, where as we saw, initially all we had to go on was some market share and growth figures.

So: 75.69% of the market in August (say, for simplicity, it's a market of 1m, though the actual figure is different) goes to 67.34% of September, with a market up 20% (say, to 1.2m. Bigger or smaller numbers?

Bigger: 67.34 x 1.2 = 80.81.

So Context is telling us that Apple sold more tablets in western Europe in September. Well, why not say so?

Perhaps because there's a feeling that telling the same story – "Apple still dominates tablet market" – is a bit boring for them to put out on press releases. But this also leads to the faintly misleading releases that don't actually reflect how the market actually is. Which, at the moment (as has been said before) is much more like the iPod market, where Apple dominated for years with a market share above 60%, than the smartphone market, where Apple is one among many players, with no single vendor dominating. (Android dominates at present, but no single vendor has more than 20%).

With some prodding, Context did come up with some other data: "Quarter on quarter, Apple sales were up from 2.46m units in Western Europe to 2.99m units. (Q2 vs Q3). The overall tablet market (incl. Apple) in Q2 was 3.16m units and in Q3 went up to 4.05m units (in Western Europe)."

Most of that Q3 rise was due to the TouchPad's fire sale.

And a parting shot: "Early Q4 indication shows that sales of all tablets in October was up 33% on September. (This growth is down primarily to Apple, which had 72% market share in October)."

In other words, those headlines about consumers not even considering the iPad, and about how well the other tablets are doing are mostly just window-dressing. In the case of Context's headline, it's not even true to say that "consumers are hungry for non-Apple tablets". Apple is still dominating the tablet sector.

And also on this evidence, RIM's PlayBook is toast at retail. Less than two per cent in August? If you put the total western European tablet market at about 1m in August (which would roughly work to give you the 3m figure for Q3) then 2% equates to 20,000 units sold. Assume RIM sold all of those; that's compared to 500,000 units shipped in the PlayBook's first quarter and 200,000 the following quarter. Of which in western Europe it sold about one-tenth of those shipped. Apple, meanwhile, seems to be able to sell all the devices it ships, which may be why it doesn't have inventory bloat like RIM's.

The bottom line? The tablet story is just as it was before. Apple's dominating and the other rivals are struggling to sell enough to make the shipments worthwhile.