Report: Microsoft has sold only 1.5m Surface tablets

Microsoft has reportedly sold a combined total of 1.5m of its Surface tablets.

News service Bloomberg reports that Microsoft has sold a little over a million Surface RT tablets, with 400,000 of the Surface Pro version sold since it launched last month.

The figures have not been confirmed by Microsoft, but if the “people with knowledge of the company’s sales” are correct the million sales of Surface RT are disappointing.

Microsoft ordered 3m Surface RT devices ahead of last October’s launch, according to analysts, with Microsoft expecting to sell 2m of the devices in December alone.

It’s pretty clear that things were bad entering the year, and at least for the moment they’re getting worse

“It’s pretty clear that things were bad entering the year, and at least for the moment they’re getting worse,” Alex Gauna, an analyst at JMP Securities, told Bloomberg. “The path to a successful Surface, in the same way that they were successful with Xbox, is not very clear to me right now.”

The scale of the problem facing Microsoft is highlighted by IDC figures that show Apple sold 22.9m iPads in the final quarter of last year, and remains the dominant slate provider, although tablets built on Android are expected to overhaul iOS devices this year.The tablet market is expected to reach global sales of 350m units a year within four years.

Sales for Surface Pro, which only launched in the US last month, have been hampered by a lack of supply, suggesting Microsoft backed the wrong horse from its own stable, underestimating demand for the more powerful Intel-based version of the tablet.