Canalys researchers say hardware manufacturers sold 30.7 million Chromebooks in 2020, the platform’s best year of all time. Therefore, Google’s productivity platform accounted for more than 10% of all personal computers sold last year.
“Demand for Chromebooks is growing,” said Canalys’ research director, Rushabh Doshi, in a prepared statement. “With many countries being forced to accelerate their digital education plans after additional blocks, schools and universities are crying out for easy-to-deploy solutions, and Google’s digital offerings for education are proving to be quite popular over rival platforms, especially on USA and Western Europe. “
According to Canalys, hardware manufacturers sold a record 11.2 million Chromebooks in the fourth quarter of 2020, the best quarter for the platform, and more than 4 times the sales recorded in the same quarter last year. And they sold 30.7 million Chromebooks in the entire year 2020. Canalys estimates the total size of the PC market in 2020 at 297 million units sold, and I came to a very similar number, 288.9 million units, calculating the average data from Gartner and IDC. But either way, Chromebooks accounted for more than 10 percent of all personal computers sold in 2020.
HP was the top seller of Chromebooks with 3.5 million units sold in the fourth quarter, says Canalys, and sales increased 235 percent year on year (YOY). Lenovo came in second with 2.8 million units sold and 1766 percent (!) Growth. Acer and Dell sold about 1.5 million units. And Samsung fell in fifth place with just over one million units sold, an increase of 630%.
Canalys says demand for Chromebooks “is expected to remain strong until 2021”. Helping in the matter, the company also claims that the platform has seen growing interest from outside the education market, including consumers and traditional business customers who are “looking for Chromebooks to ensure business continuity or personal computing at affordable prices”.
Canalys also noted that the tablet market also experienced strong growth in 2020, with sales reaching an all-time high of 52.8 million units in the fourth quarter and 160.6 million units throughout 2020; that last figure is 28 percent higher than in 2019. Apple sold almost 20 million of these tablets, the best performance for iPad since 2014. (Interestingly, this reflects almost exactly the PC growth experience in 2020, where sales were larger than in any year since 2015.) Samsung (9.9 million units), Amazon (6.5 million), Lenovo (5.6 million) and Huawei (3.5 million) complete the top five.