Moto’s Marketshare Went To Incumbent Handset Vendors, Not New Entrants: Report
By James Quintana Pearce - Fri 25 Apr 2008 07:33 AM PST
There has been some shuffling in the marketshare of the top five handset manufacturers, but no major change in new entrants according to Strategy Analytics. Although Motorola (NYSE: MOT) lost a lot of marketshare both sequentially and year-on-year, putting almost a tenth of the market up for grabs, that was mostly taken up by the other big four manufacturers. The table of marketshare according to Strategy Analytics is shown below.
Nokia (NYSE: NOK) had a marketshare of 40.9 percent in the first quarter of 2008 according to Strategy Analytics, up from 36.9 percent in the first quarter of 2007 and 38.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2007. This differs from Nokia’s own estimate of a fall in marketshare to 39 percent last quarter, which Neil Mawston, Director at Strategy Analytics, put down to Nokia having a larger handset total than Strategy Analytics, although he couldn’t say why that was. Strategy Analytics measures the number of handsets the manufacturer sells to the mobile operators or resellers.
So the fall in marketshare of Motorola (and to a lesser extent Sony (NYSE: SNE) Ericsson (NSDQ: ERIC), which lost 1 percent of the market year-on-year) was taken up by Nokia, Samsung and LG (SEO: 066570) rather than going to a new entrant. Strategy Analytics reported that improved handset portfolios enabled LG to grow at almost 4 times the annual industry average, while Samsung is growing over 2 times faster.
Apple’s (NSDQ: AAPL) global handset shipments fell sharply compared to the previous quarter, to 1.7 million in Q1 from 2.3 million in Q4. All handset sales fall between Q4 and Q1, but iPhone sales fell faster, meaning that Apple’s global marketshare declined for the first time—from 0.7 percent in Q4 2007 to 0.6 percent in Q1 2008. That’s a respectable figure for a single handset, of course.
The “others” category of handset manufacturers gained just 0.9 percent year-on-year (suspiciously close to Apple’s marketshare, no?) and remained stable from quarter to quarter. Mawston told MocoNews that while some of the smaller manufacturers were doing reasonably well (RIM (NSDQ: RIMM), HTC and ZTE were examples) others were struggling.
Posted in: Companies, Apple, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Gadgets, Research & Metrics
