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Unbranded Chinese phones grab more market share
By siliconindia
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Thursday, 11 November 2010, 12:52 IST
Bangalore: Global handset shipment has reached 417 million units in the third quarter owing to a surge in the sales of low-cost Chinese cellphones, reveals a new study from the research firm Gartner. This has taken a toll in the market share of Nokia which slipped to 28.2 percent in Q3, down from 36.7 percent a year earlier.
The Gartner study states that shipments of 'white-box' or unbranded cellphones rose sharply in emerging markets as Chinese manufacturers expanded into regions like India and Africa. The rapid growth of the unbranded phones largely affected the combined market share of the world's five largest handset vendors, which fell to 67 percent from 83 percent a year earlier.
The study suggested that cellphone shipments are expected to increase over 30 percent in 2010 from 2009, mainly due to the rising unbranded cellphone shipments.
"Chinese makers, who typically build phones around chipsets from Taiwan's MediaTek, can push out simple devices at very low prices as they have low manufacturing costs and often copy older hardware designs from other vendors," Gartner Research Vice President, Carolina Milanesi was quoted as saying by totaltele.com.
Despite the decline in sales, Nokia holds top spot while Android takes number two spot in smartphone platforms, accounting for 25.5 percent of the market. Apple overtook RIM to become the fourth-largest handset maker in the world. The iPhone maker shipped 13.5 million devices which took its market share up to 3.2 percent from 2.3 percent in the year ago quarter. The market share of HTC rose to 1.6 percent from 0.9 percent in the third quarter of 2009. Apple was the only one to grow its market share among the five global handset makers.