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17 percent increase in mobile phone sales in Q1 2010: Gartner
By siliconindia
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Wednesday, 19 May 2010, 22:24 IST
Egham : According to Gartner, smart phone sales to end users reached 54.3 million units, an increase of 48.7 percent from the first quarter of 2009. Worldwide mobile phone sales has seen a raise of 17 percent to end users totaled 314.7 million units in the first quarter of 2010, a increase from the same period in 2009.
"In the first quarter of 2010, smart phone sales to end users saw their strongest year-on-year increase since 2006," said Carolina Milanesi, Research Vice President at Gartner. This quarter saw RIM, a pure smart phone player, make its debut in the top five mobile devices manufacturers, and saw Apple increase its market share by 1.2 percentage points.
Hong Kong-based manufacturer G-Five made its debut into the top 10, grabbing 1.4 percent of market share in the first quarter of 2010. The rise of white-box manufacturers from Asia has also helped the "others" section, as a proportion of overall sales, increase its market share to 19.20 percent in the first quarter of 2010, up 2.7 percentage points. "This is having a profound effect on the top five mobile handset manufacturers' combined share that dropped from 73.3 percent in the first quarter of 2009 to 70.7 percent in the first quarter of 2010," said Milanesi.
Mobile e-mail, rich messaging and social networking will proceed to bring home the demand for smart phones and enhanced phones that feature full qwerty hardware keyboards. "To compete in such a crowded market, manufacturers need to tightly integrate hardware, user interface, and cloud and social networking services if their solutions are to appeal to users," said Roberta Cozza, Principal Research Analyst at Gartner.
Growth in the mobile devices market was controlled by double-digit growth of smart phone sales in mature markets, which provided a wider product availability and even mass market price tags. "Increasing sales of white-box products in some emerging regions, in particular India also drove sales of mobile phones upward. We expect sales of white-box products to remain very healthy for the remainder of 2010, especially outside of China," said Milanesi.
Nokia's mobile phone sales had reached 110.1 million units, a 1.2 percent fall in market share year-on-year. Though Nokia's midtier products sold well, Nokia lacks a high-volume driver in the high-end. "MeeGo based devices and other high-end products will not rejuvenate Nokia's premium portfolio until the end of the third quarter of 2010 at the earliest, and Nokia will continue to feel pressure on its average selling price (ASP) from vendors such as HTC, RIM and Samsung," said Milanesi.
Samsung made a trade of 64.9 million devices in the first quarter of 2010, an increase of 26.3 per cent year-on-year. It was one of the five vendors in the top10 vendors which grew its market share, and increased by 1.5 percentage points year-on-year. Samsung saw healthy margins in developing markets such as India and the Commonwealth of Independent States.
RIM's mobile phone sales attained 10.6 million units in the first quarter of 2010, a 45.9 percent increase year-on-year. RIM's focus this quarter was centered on its ecosystem strategy, its tightly integrated control of store, OS and device played to RIM's strengths. RIM made its ways to the top five mobile handset manufacturers.
Though Sony Ericsson sold enough units to be in the top five mobile handset manufacturers,its market share declined 2.3 percentage points in the first quarter of 2010 .
Android and Apple were the winners in the first quarter of 2010 according to the OS market. Android went No. 4 position displacing Microsoft Windows Mobile for the first time.The first quarter of 2010 was Apple's strongest quarter yet, which placed the company in the No.7 position with a 112.2 per cent increase in mobile devices sales. "Growth came partly from new communication service providers in established markets, such as the UK, and stronger sales in new markets such as China and South Korea," said Milanesi.
Smart phones accounted for 17.3 percent of all mobile handset sales in the first quarter of 2010, up from 13.6 per cent in the same period in 2009.
