Gartner maps a rapidly changing mobile device market

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 19 May 2011 18:05

IT Industry - Market

Gartner's mobile device shipment data for Q1 2011 has total sales at almost half a billion units, Nokia still the market leader by a very healthy margin, and in the smartphone market shows Android as having made a meteoric rise to oust Symbian from the number one OS slot.

According to Gartner, worldwide mobile communication device sales to end users totalled 427.8 million units in the first quarter of 2011, an increase of 19 percent from the first quarter of 2010 with smartphones accounting for 23.6 percent, an increase of 85 percent year-on-year.

Roberta Cozza, principal research analyst at Gartner, said: "[Smartphones'] market share could have been even higher, but manufacturers announced a number of high-profile devices during the first quarter of 2011 that would not ship until the second quarter of 2011. We believe some consumers delayed their purchases to wait for these models."

With sales of 107.5 million devices in the quarter Nokia was the market leader with a 25.1 percent market share, but this was 5.5 percentage points down on a year ago and its lowest share since 1997. Samsung was number two with 16.1 percent. The two retained a clear lead on number three, LG with 5.6 percent. The much-hyped Apple came in at number four with 3.9 percent.

Nokia, however, was not the only vendor losing market share. The top three all lost share. Samsung from 18.0 to 16.1 percent and LG from 7.6 to 5.6 percent. Apple doubled unit shipments to 16.9 million giving it a 70 percent boost in its market share, from 2.3 to 3.9 percent. HTC did well also, tripling its volumes to 9.3 million units and boosting its market share from 0.9 to 2.2 percent.

However by far the biggest volume growth came from a host of unidentified vendors not in the top 10. They boosted volumes from 104.2 million to 154.8 million and their market share from 29.0 to 36.2 percent.

In the smartphone market the landscape has changed dramatically in the past 12 months as a result of the rise of Android, from 9.6 percent of sales to 36.0 percent. Most of this was at the expense of Symbian whose market share fell from 44.2 to 27.4 percent. However in a market that almost doubled from 54.5 million to 100.8 million units the only operating system to see its volumes go backwards was Microsoft. Its market share fell from 6.8 to 3.6 percent and its volumes from 3.70 million to 3.67 million.

Gartner predicts that Nokia will aggressively lower average selling prices in markets where communications service providers control the sales channels, in order to maintain shipments of Symbian devices while waiting for its first Windows Phone 7 devices to reach the market.

But at the same time Nokia's strategic alliance with Microsoft on Windows Phone 7, and the retirement of Symbian "will precipitate a competitors' rush to capture Symbian's market share in the mid tier," Gartner says.