market share

Kantar World Panel has released it's U.S. market analysis for the three month period ending February 2013. While Android slipped into the number one spot  with 51.2%, ahead of iOS, our Windows Phones has made a nice jump with its market share.

Compared to the same period in 2012, Windows Phone's market share went from 2.7% to 4.1%. Apple experienced a decline falling from 47% to 43.5% and RIM fell from 3.6% to 0.7%.

Statistics from Localytics are showing that Nokia is now the key supplier of Windows Phones handsets worldwide. Whilst this news might not surprise many considering Nokias considerable push in the retail channels, it does paint an interesting picture of the state of play with the three main manufacturers. According to Localytics survey, Nokia is now clearly in pole position as of July with 59% of total sales.

While the survey shows Nokia winning in market share it also illustrates the rise of sales in Windows Phone units from January until the present.  Interestingly the growth looks almost to be exclusively with Nokia, the other device maker’s shipments look to have remained almost static since April.

Microsoft, Nokia & AT&T had high hopes for the Lumia 900 back in January

Microsoft with the help of Nokia has stemmed the bleeding of market share over the last two years as the new comScore number just published reveal.

The number of mobile subscribers is up 0.1% to 4.0% ending at the end of May, 2012. That means those numbers include the launch of Nokia’s much hyped Lumia 900 on AT&T and softer launches of the admirable Samsung Focus 2 and HTC Titan 2.

That’s the good news because Microsoft has been losing market share to Android and the iPhone for a very long time now. If we look back to the same period in May 2011, you can see Microsoft had 5.8% of the market and continued to slide up until the end of May this year.

The bad news is multifaceted. For one, these numbers include Microsoft’s legacy Windows Mobile devices, which presumably have now mostly died off. Number two should be obvious. Although stopping the hemorrhage and gaining some market share for the first time in years, a 0.1% increase is hardly anything to be excited about—especially if you’re Nokia.

comScore's latest numbers show Microsoft doing slightly better

The Nokia Lumia 900 on AT&T is hands down the most visible and well promoted Windows Phone to date. The marketing campaign was quite solid, presence was high and it was being heavily discussed in the press. Despite those efforts, Microsoft and Nokia have barely been able to squeak by and if anything, we can read the 900’s sales as being mediocre, at best. We're also curious to see how Nokia's stock will respond, though our guess is not well (currently it's still at the very low $2.14, up slightly).

That certainly has to be disappointing, especially for those of us who had pinned high hopes on this AT&T flagship device. And although June may also bring in some more numbers, our bet is sales of dropped slightly and not increased making 4.1% by the end of the summer the likely market share for Microsoft.

comScore of course is not the only numbers house around, so take these numbers with a grain of salt until they can be corroborated with other market indicators.

Source: comScore

Industry research firm Gartner just released its latest data on mobile phone sales for the first quarter of 2012. There are some interesting points to be pulled out of this report that I wanted to address.

Samsung dominates Android. Gartner’s data says that Korea-based Samsung shipped over 40% of all Android handsets last quarter. So that still leaves 60% of the market to other vendors, right? Yes, but according to Gartner none of these other vendors make up more than 10% of Android volume. None.

In terms of handset brands, Samsung is also now the #1 phone maker in the world, ahead of Nokia.

Nokia may have the #2 position in the market, but we need to remember that most of Nokia’s volume is based on the dying Symbian OS. Very little is based on its Windows-powered future at this point. So, considering that we’re looking at the death of the dumphone over the next few years, let’s look at smartphone vendors and volumes.

Samsung is the #1 player, having shipped 38 million smartphones. Most of these are Android powered, with a smaller number of Bada OS phones. Here’s how smartphone market share looks, by vendor, based on the Gartner data:

1. Samsung with 26% market share
2. Apple with 23%
3. RIM with 7%

These are essentially the top 3 smartphone players right now. I realize that ZTE, LG and Huawei have a larger portion of the mobile market than RIM, but RIM is a pure play on smartphones whereas these three are not. Remember that other Android vendors have less than one quarter of Samsung’s volume.

What does this data mean to Windows Phone?

Back in late Feb, I wrote a post on Crackberry about how we’ll know if RIM is successful. In that article I suggested that, as the mobile phone market moves purely to smartphones, RIM could go from 3% market share to over 5%. I said they’ve got a shot at being the #4 player behind Samsung, Apple and Nokia (not necessarily in that order).

Although other vendors, such as HTC, have talked about building Windows Phone products, we all know that Nokia is the only true partner at this point. And it’s still early days in terms of understanding how this will all unfold.

Nokia’s big challenge is to migrate its customer base form a dying Symbian platform over to Windows Phone. That’s going to be a HUGE challenge in the developing markets, especially given the cost differential between cheap Symbian phones and expensive Windows powered phones. So it seems to me that Nokia could fall off the map here, ending up with much, much less market share than their current 19.8%.

Ideally, Microsoft would benefit form the support of more manufacturing partners. But if they can’t win more vendors over, they may as well buy Nokia and control their entire platform just as Apple and RIM do. For that matter, even Google is ready to fully control Android (via the Motorola acquisition) in the event that Samsung somehow moves to control its own platform.

I like Microsoft’s strategy of converging the user experience on mobile and desktop. It’s differentiated. Microsoft has always been a company who delivers great developer tools. Microsoft needs to win over developer momentum here, badly.

But, unfortunately, if either Microsoft of Nokia stumble here, the chances of Windows Phone becoming a dominant platform shrink significantly.

Nokia is still the # 2 global player in the mobile phone market. This is a good base on which to convert customers over to Windows Phones. But every quarter that Nokia bleeds share to the competition (mainly Android), the race gets much harder.

In a happy yet somewhat odd metric of success, Windows Phone sales are on the verge of passing those of Symbian, at least in the UK. The data comes by way of Kantar Worldpanel Comtech who collected data from 15,000 users including which device they are using and if they bought a new one.

The story of who's at top is a familiar one with Android with 36.9 percent and the iPhone at 28.5 percent for installed-base stats. But the site Electric Pig points out, the monthly sales figures are a little more revealing with Symbian crashing from 15% a year ago to 2.8% in January 2012--not at all surprising with Nokia all but abandoning the platform. But Microsoft's Windows Phone has bounced from 0.4 percent to 2.2 percent year-on-year with a current adoption rate which will bypass Symbian's figures in the next month.

Of course passing a nearly dead OS is perhaps not the best thing to celebrate and clearly Windows Phone is miles behind iOS and Android in terms of market share. But trends are important and it seems clear now that Nokia is having a big impact on Windows Phone sales in the UK (Comtech's scores don't break down by OEM, just OS but we think it's a safe assumption).

It will be even more interesting to see Kantar Worldpanel Comtech's numbers in the coming  months to see if the +0.15% per month increase for Windows Phone has increased with Nokia's recent marketing blitz there--those January numbers were just the beginning of that push for the UK.

Read more at Electric Pig; Market photo via Shutterstock

Funny how different things can be in two yearsr on the mobile front.

Early last year, Palm was still Palm, teetering under competition, but then got a life-saver by being purchased by HP. Of course that turned out to be a disaster and now Palm, webOS and that company's legacy seems to be sentenced to irrelevance. Symbian was still controlling large swaths of the market as was RIM, makers of the enterprise-friendly BlackBerry.  In fact, just two years ago, RIM was sitting in first place with a whopping 42% of the device market. Now in late 2011 in the US? Just 9% according to the latest numbers from Canalys.

Things are so bad for RIM right now that its stocks, valued at US $18.91 a share, just dropped below their book value of $18.92. Book value roughly translates to "cash, inventories, real estate and intellectual property minus its liabilities" (according to the Sydney Morning Herald). Yup, the stock is worth less than what the actual company is valued at. And even that valuation, especially in patents, may be over-stated according to some, due to their age.  RIM does supposedly have a trick up its sleeve: BBX, its new mobile platform. But all signs point to it not only being delayed but underwhelming as well, much like the PlayBook.

Microsoft was and some would say still is, in a precarious situation analogous to RIM. But Microsoft launched Windows Phone 7 just over a year ago and by all accounts, it's a critical success (that has yet to materialize into solid market share). But it also has a successful ecosystem with Windows, Office, Exchange, Xbox, Kinect  and its myriad of cloud-services. In other words, Microsoft can literally afford to lose money until the world wakes up and their mobile OS takes off. RIM? Not so much as they have no other source of income.

So in that sense, it's no surprise to hear calls for RIM to be chopped up and sold off, like a foreclosed home to the highest bidder (see CNet) There is no faith that RIM can pull itself out of this hole, catch up and over pass Microsoft, who now have spiritually become the third major mobile OS. The tone has shifted in the last few months, can you hear it? It's due mostly due to the successful launch of Windows Phone 7.5 aka "Mango"--people now mention Windows Phone in the same breath as Android and the iPhone. BlackBerry or webOS? Not at all. A year ago, we had to wave our hands to get attention from the big developers, but no longer. Remember the blitz this summer? And with Nokia and Skype on board, things are only looking better.

Sure, two years from now we could see another massive restructuring of the players involved. But we're betting Apple, Google and Microsoft will be the only three names mentioned in mobile, with RIM retired along with webOS and Symbian. From RIM's failure to successfully compete comes Microsoft's entry as the third-way. What's more, Microsoft is poised to go even further in the next few years as its "three screens and a cloud" vision becomes a reality. Here's looking at you, 2015. We can't wait.

We love analysts and predictions, especially when they paint Windows Phone 7 in particularly good light, and Gartner (a leading worldwide technology research and advisory company) has done just that with their latest prediction.

Having a gander at the chart above, we can see the accumulative market total topping 1 billion by 2015 and Microsoft has been predicted to achieve 19.5% market share (compared to the 4.2 they currently hold) - Not bad for a platform that is continuously said to be "failing". Gartner revised its forecast of market share for WP7 taking into account the Nokia partnership, which is said to push the platform into mid-tier of its portfolio by the end of next year.

On a general note, "by 2015, 67 percent of all open OS devices will have an average selling price of $300 or below, proving that smartphones have been finally truly democratized," said Roberta Cozza, principal analyst at Gartner. We have already covered other predictions that WP7 will overtake RIM from Ovum, so what Gartner has posted seems in-line.

What do you think of these predictions, and what is forecasted for WP7?

Source: Gartner, via: WMPU

Looks like all is not doom and gloom with Windows Phone 7. While there have been plenty of surveys noting that the OS is not catching on as fast, Microsoft has always taken the position that this is a marathon, not a race and that eventually the OS will break through.

According to a new Nielsen survey, Microsoft's mobile OS's (Windows Phone 7, Windows Mobile) command 10% of the market share. This is actually quite a jump, if accurate, from the oft-cited 6% number that we've seen in other surveys. The survey looks at the last three months of data and has Android at 29% and Apple, RIM tied at 27%. Unfortunately we don't know the exact breakdown between Mobile/Phone 7, but we shudder to think that WM has made a comeback of late and that WP7 is more than 2%, as the NPD survey shows.

Getting back to Windows, Ross Rubin, executive director of industry analysis for NPD, had nothing but positive things to say. According to Sci-Tech Today, he praised Windows Phone 7's differentiation and product integration but suggested they still need to "...close the feature gap, offer more exclusive capabilities, work with partners to deliver hardware with better differentiation, and leverage its extensive experience in driving developer communities to increase its app offerings." Meanwhile, Al Hilwa, director of applications development software at IDC lauded Microsoft's Marketplace both in terms of app buildup and quality of apps, suggesting it is one of the most successful launches to date. He also mentioned how we won't see the full power of Microsoft till the next version of Windows, which seeks full integration across product lines:

Most importantly, the full weight of the ecosystem will probably not come to bear on this until Windows PCs themselves are brought into alignment with this when Windows for ARM ships, and some viable Microsoft-based tablets are in the market.

That we agree with too, even if it is nearly 2 years out. Regardless, it's nice to see both that 10% number and various industry analysts bullish on Windows Phone 7 and Microsoft's plans.

Source: Nielsen, NPD, IDC; via Sci-Tech Today

IDC, who you may remember from the Microsoft-used-the-wrong-slide media fiasco earlier this year, has gone ahead and released their forecast for smartphone adoption over the next five years in their Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker report.

Personally, we can't even imagine what a smartphone will look like in 2014, nor what the market landscape, but assuming the current state of things, lets see what IDC says:

• For the first half of 2010, vendors shipped a total of 119.4 million units or 55.5% more than the 76.8 million units shipped during the first half of 2009
• "Android is the wild card, deserving close observation for the rest of this year and the years to come,"
• IDC now expects the 2010 overall mobile phone market to grow 14.1%, or 1.5% higher than its previous forecast. Last year, the market declined 2.8%, the first such occurrence in Mobile Phone Tracker history
• Despite uncertainty about the economy, the smartphone market is expected to increase 24.5% in 2011. However, smartphone growth will decline progressively over the course of IDC's five-year forecast period. In 2014, for example, the market is expected to rise by just 13.6%
• No one smartphone OS will dominate mobile phones in the way that Microsoft has with Windows on the personal computer. "IDC believes the market will comfortably support up to five OS players over the next five years,"

Finally, the big news for Microsoft it they are expected to regain market share bumping from a low of 6.8% to 9.8% by 2014. While that's only a 3% change in overall market share, due to the increasingly huge numbers of smartphones we are talking about, it translates into a 43% change in volume, which is pretty significant (assuming its accuracy). At that point, Microsoft would only trail Android as far as speed of growth.

While no one predicts Microsoft to dominate the mobile OS field anytime soon, it's not too hard to imagine them being a major player by 2014, if they play their cards right.