Gartner published a few days ago their assessment of the Smartphone market in Q2 2008. These are the highlights by handset maker:
- Smartphone market grew 15.7% compared to last year.
- Nokia remains the number one vendor, but it is losing market share from 50.8% in 2007 to 47.5% in 2008.
- RIM is the fastest growing vendor , more than doubling their market share from 8.9% to 17.4%.
- HTC also doubled its share from 2.2% to 4.1% (cosnidering only handsets sold on HTC brand, and moved to third position.
On the Operating System:
- Symbian lost market share from 65.6% to 57.1%.
- RIM increased its share by 126% in line with the share of its handsets.
- Windows Mobile market share grew 21% to reach 12% of the smartphone OS.
- Despite Q2 was not strong for iPhone -as they cleaned the channel before the 3G iPhone launch in July- it still surpassed Palm OS in market share.
In summary, Nokia is clearly losing ground to Blackberry and Windows Mobile. After the launch of the 3G iPhone in Q3, expect to see a bigger hit in Nokia’s share in Q3. Not only the iPhone will eat market share. Microsoft’s mobile OS is powering most of the nicest touch-screen models brought by LG, HTC and Samsung to compete with Apple’s phone. This will surely hurt Nokia’s share too.
But the main surprise is the growth of RIM in Q2, even before their new Bold was available. Mobile email is showing to be the killer app, and RIM’s usability for email is superb. And do not forget RIM makes money not just from the handsets but also for the email service they host and the server licenses they sell to enterprises. That is extra cash (and margin) to boost their R&D. Something Nokia might be lacking.
To make matters worse for Nokia, a newcomer will soon make appearance in the charts: Android. With so much competition, do not be surprise if we see Nokia lose their crown even earlier than forecasted by TechCrunch.
Related posts:
