Winners and losers in our Q3 numbers
Our Q3 mobile handset market numbers have been released and there are few surprises. Smartphone sales are growing, over 12% up on the same period last year despite the recession, with Apple overtaking RIM in Western Europe. That’s impressive, but it will be more of a shock to RIM when Apple overtake them in the US – which will happen at some point. Nokia lost a little market share but are still the biggest manufacturer of handsets by far holding on to about 36% which isn’t too bad considering ...
their high end smartphone portfolio is weak. Both Motorola and SonyEricsson had a horrible quarter, under 5% share in each case, Motorola’s Android handsets are still too new to have made any impact on their market share.
Looking at platforms, the losers were Symbian and Windows Mobile, although the former can better afford to lose a few points of share as it’s still a long way ahead of the pack. The winners were RIM, iPhone and Android, although the latter is starting from such a small market share that it still makes up only 3.5% of smartphones. So no big surprises, things still look on track for our prediction that Android will become the number 2 platform in 3 years. Although Symbian is strong, it’s mostly because of Nokia; the move to open source hasn’t yet attracted lots of new handset manufacturers. Symbian (i.e. Nokia) can’t afford to stand still, the foundation should nuke the current feeble Symbian user interface as soon as possible and re-invent it, but I don’t see that happening until 2010.
The smartphone platform wars are a numbers game. Ultimately it’s all about creating positive feedback loops. Developers will go where the most users are, users will want platforms which have the best developers and the largest range of applications and content. Of course not all users are alike, Apple has attracted more than its share of compulsive downloaders, so their developers can make a living from a smaller number of more active users. But in the long term it won’t be the early adopter app-addicts who define the market, it will be the mainstream subscribers. They may not suffer from the same level of download addiction, but there sure are a lot of them.
If you need more information about the handset market in Q3 and you’re a client you should talk to Carolina Milanesi or Roberta Cozza. I’ll get on a plane for Sydney tomorrow evening, so will be offline for a day, and jet lagged for a few days more. See you next week.
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