International Data Corporation says it’s looking gloomy on the horizon for tablet vendors. The market watcher believes that growth in sales of tablets and ‘hybrid’ tablet/computers is set to slow dramatically next year.

“The worldwide tablet market is expected to see a massive deceleration in 2014 with year-over-year growth slowing to 7.2%, down from 52.5% in 2013,” claims IDC in its latest analysis.

IDC offers several reasons for the expected decline, including longer product replacement cycles and the fact that smartphones are slowly becoming more capable and filling the role of tablets. Meanwhile, hybrid computers like Microsoft Corp’s Surface Pro are struggling due to consumer’s hesistancy around Windows 8.

“The tablet market continues to be impacted by a few major trends happening in relevant markets,” says Ryan Reith, program director with IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Device Trackers.

“In the early stages of the tablet market, device lifecycles were expected to resemble those of smartphones, with replacement occurring every 2-3 years. What has played out instead is that many tablet owners are holding onto their devices for more than 3 years and in some instances more than 4 years. We believe the two major drivers for longer-than-expected tablet lifecycles are legacy software support for older products, especially within iOS, and the increased use of smartphones for a variety of computing tasks.”

It’s not all bad news for Microsoft though, as IDC believes Windows devices will actually grow faster than either Android or iOS.

Worldwide Tablet/2-in-1 Shipments, Market Share, Year-Over-Year Growth, and 5-Year CAGR by Operating System, 2014-2018 (shipment volumes in millions). Source: IDC

The table above also suggests the overall global market for tablets will continue to grow over the next four years, but that growth will be incredibly slow – the market will hit some 136.6 million annual sales by 2018, which is just 20.2 million more than 2014’s expected sales.

A more interesting takeaway from this data is that predictions of tablet sales one day surpassing those of PCs now seem like a pipe dream, even with the latter market’s slow and steady decline. IDC’s most recent forecast puts worldwide PC sales at 291.1 million units in 2018, more than double that of its forecast for tablets.

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