Tablet sales hit head winds.

Stopping for a breather? Or a harbinger off hard times ahead. Earlier this month when Ingram Micro was delivering its positive Q2 earnings summary to analysts, an almost casual answer to a question about tablet sales suggested all is not well with the personal technology sector’s favourite growth driver.

Ingram Micro CEO Alain Monie was asked about the impact of declining tablet sales on the Ingram’s business and the analysts queried whether Ingram was de-emphasising the tablet market because of the lower margins it provided.

Not so, according to Monie.”And in the past, we've mentioned that tablets came with lower margins but acceptable returns. So we didn't really take any specific decision to do less.”

The real issue, according to Monie was this:“It's just that as you've heard from manufacturers as well, the sales in tablets have gone down. And so the impact in our business is simply a direct impact of those dynamics on the market. So it is market driven, not through our decisions, specifically.”

Microsoft’s problems in the tablet market are legend. The company’s Surface line simply failed to take holder amongst its user community – some blamed the Windows 8 operating systems, pthers said it was Redmond’s lack of channel strategy.

Whatever the reason, the end result was that the company had to write down $900 million worth of stock in its Q2 financial results..

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO told staff, that Microsoft overestimated demand for its Surface tablets and ended up making too many of them. Included in the comments of a Town hall style meeting, which quickly leaked, he said, “"We built a few more devices than we could sell." Microsoft slashed its pricing for Surface RT by 30 percent earlier this month, then revealed a $900 million charge last week during its fourth-quarter earnings that reflected the price cut.

However, Microsoft was no alone in delivering lower than anticipated tablet sales (although it does occupy a league of its own in terms of the scale of the failure).

Apple’s iPad 3 sales for the quarter were 14.6 million against a forecast of 18 million, quite a bad miss.

Apple’s CFO Peter Oppenheimer told analysts, “The tough year-over-year comparison was driven by both the significant channel inventory increase and the first full quarter of the availability of the third generation iPad in the year ago quarter. We built 1.2 million units of iPad channel inventory in the June quarter last year whereas we reduced channel inventory by 700,000 units in the June quarter this year.”

He said that factoring in this 1.9 million unit channel inventory swing, iPad unit sell-through was down 3% year-over-year. “We exited the quarter with about 4.1 million units of iPad channel inventory within our target range of 4 to 6 weeks.”