It is estimated that the total number of flat plates in 2017 will reach 900 million units

According to foreign media reports, Forrester, a market research company, predicts that the global tablet computer market will continue to maintain a rapid growth trend in the next few years. It is expected that the market will achieve a combined annual growth rate of 25.6% from 2012 to 2017.

Forrester expects that from the year of 2012 to 2017, the total number of global tablet PCs to be installed in the five years will reach 905 million units. It is estimated that the tablet PC sales in 2017 will reach 381 million units.

In 2010, when Apple released the first generation iPad, the total installed capacity of global tablet computers was only 15 million units. Forrester analysts expect that there will be 327 million tablet PCs in use this year. As of the second quarter of 2013, the total sales of the Apple iPad exceeded 140 million units.

According to Forrester, tablet computing is the most successful product in the computing market to be fragmented today. It expects tablet computers to exhibit a new type of collaborative computing behavior in the future, involving the use of multiple tablet computers or similar devices that support multi-user interaction.

Forrester expects that by 2017, 60% of online consumers in North America will have tablets. In Europe, this ratio is slightly lower, about 42%, while in developing countries, the penetration rate of tablet PCs will still be lower than 25%. However, Forrester expects the growth of the tablet market in some Asian countries such as Singapore and South Korea will be faster than the developed countries market, when the tablet will become a common computing tool.