Study: Chromebook Sales to Increase to 5.2 Million in 2014

In a new study, Gartner is predicting that the already popular Chromebook will reach milestone sales records, with the cloud-based devices seeing sales of 5.2 million units by the end of the year. If this prediction is true, it would mark a 79 percent increase in sales over 2013, driven mainly by the increasingly tech-friendly education market.

"Competition in the Chromebook market is intensifying as more vendors launch Chromebooks, with eight models in the market in 2014," said Isabelle Durand, principal analyst at Gartner, in a statement. "Now that the PC market is no longer growing strongly, vendors are searching for new business opportunities. They launched Chromebooks to revive interest in sub-$300 portable PCs once the netbook bubble had burst."

Chromebook sales will continue to rise for the next several years, with sales forecasts reaching upwards of $14 million units sold in 2017 alone, according to Gartner. The increasing use of technology in the education vertical is thought to be the number one reason for the rapid increase in sales and Chromebook’s predicted success in the next several years. In 2013, Gartner attributed nearly 85 percent of Chromebook sales to the education market, with 82 percent of the total Chromebooks sold coming from North America.

When it comes to sales by vendor, Samsung currently dominates in the Chromebook market, with the company selling 1.7 million units last year for a total of 64.9 percent of the global market. Acer followed suit with 21.4 percent of the total market share, with Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Lenovo rounding out the list of heavy-hitters. Dell currently holds just a paltry 0.3 percent of the market with its one single Chromebook offering.

But despite healthy sales predictions, Chromebooks are expected to remain a niche market during the next five years, according to Gartner. In their current state, Chromebooks are still limited by their very basic functionality and lack of performance features, which, ironically, allowed them to be more affordable and accessible to the education market in the first place. However, Gartner noted that Chromebooks need to offer faster connectivity, faster memory access and larger solid state drives if they wish to draw the attention of the business crowd and truly become the go-to device for audiences beyond primary and secondary schools.