The Government has offered Australia's three mobile operators, and vividwireless, renewal of their existing spectrum allocated on 15 year licences in the late 90s and early 2000s at set prices, while the Government expects to rake in $3 billion.
Things were less rosy for the handset industry overall. In total, 269 million handsets were sold during the first calendar quarter, down 14.5 percent on the previous quarter and down 9.4 percent on the corresponding period in 2008.
While Nokia also maintained its position as the leading handset supplier, its overall market share slipped to 36.2 percent from 39.1 percent in 1Q08 as its sales volume dropped from 115.2 million to 97.4 million units.
Samsung and LG both had a fairly solid quarter.
Samsung saw volume rise from 42.4 million to 51.4 million pushing its market share up 4.7 percentage points to 19.1 percent, while LG went from 23.6 million to 26.5 million for a market share gain of 1.9 percentage points to 8 percent.
The losers were Motorola (dropping more than 13 million units to 16.6 million and losing 4 percentage points of share to 6.2 percent) and Sony Ericsson (down more than 7 million units to 14.5 million and 2.1 percentage points of share to 5.4 percent).
Gartner does not expect the demand for handsets to stabilise before the second half of 2010.
"Device vendors will focus increasingly on smartphones, improved user interfaces and services to differentiate themselves and fuel consumer demand," predicted Gartner research director Carolina Milanesi.
David Bass
| ComOps, a leading Australian provider of business software products and services, has won a competitive tender to deploy its Salvus safety, r…
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