Nokia to help WinPho outsell iOS in four years
Google - but not Android phone makers - triumphant
Come 2015 and Microsoft will own more of the smartphone OS market than Apple does.
Redmond will have 19.5 per cent of the market, Cupertino just 17.2 per cent. The folk up in Canada - Research in Motion, if you have to ask - will have 11.1 per cent.
So says market watcher Gartner, just one of a number of such firms to forecast big growth for Android over the next four years. Google's OS will be running on 48.8 per cent of smartphones in 2015.
Android lovers will see that as a triumphant validation of their favourite platform, but Gartner's numbers show that none of its major rivals doing particularly badly.
Such is the extent to which the smartphone market will grow over the coming years, Apple will sell more than four times as many iPhones in 2015 is it did in 2010. Rim's sales will grow by a factor of 2.6 over the same period - Microsoft's a staggering 17.5 times.
Android units will be up eightfold.
Symbian, by contrast, will be all but dead. Other OSes, such as HP's WebOS and Samsung's Bada, will barely trouble the scorer.
Unfortunately, many will be low-end, low-margin models, a fair few of them sold into emerging markets. That will mean Android-phone vendors will sell lots of handsets, but make far less money per phone than Apple and RIM do. And there are lot more of them competing with each other than there are rivals using other operating systems.
Microsoft's growth will come largely from Nokia, and it too has a history of aiming for the middle rather than the upper end of the market.
"By 2015, 67 per cent of all open OS devices will have an average selling price of $300 or below," Gartner said.
Of course, Apple, RIM and Nokia may all make greater play for the bottom end of the smartphone market over the coming years, and that's bound to hinder Android's growth, most forecasts for which are predicated on those three remaining focused on the mid-range and high-ends of the market.
Gartner's forecast does show that the smartphone market will not be a re-run of the old Apple vs Wintel fight, with one platform dominating massively. Even through 2015, there will still be a lot for Apple, RIM and Microsoft/Nokia to play for. ®
COMMENTS
Why do The Reg keep claiming that Samsung, HTC etc aren't making any money?
The "fact" that Samsung, HTC and other Android OEMs aren't making any money seems to be regularly trotted out by The Reg without any source or justification, whenever Android sales numbers exceed Apple's.
HTC just overtook the market cap of RIM and Nokia (I think they slipped back behind Nokia again the next day, but the general trend is pretty clear). Samsung must be printing money since they basically make all the component parts themselves. All of them seem to be quadrupling output and sales every year. I've not seen anything credible to suggest they're not coining it in thanks to Android.
The only exception is the regular articles that fly round the Apple blog-o-sphere where they conveniently throw in the numbers from Samsung, Motorola and LG's dumbphone manufacturing wings to bring down their average profit numbers. They'll also casually omit HTC from any such comparison as it is a smartphone only shop like Apple and RIM and as such would completely blow the gaffe on this nonsense.
In 2007...
Back in 2007, Gartner predicted that windows mobile would completely dominate the smartphone market by 2010...
Now that it's 2010, windows mobile has been dropped and replaced with an incompatible replacement, neither of which are doing all that well in the market.... So take what gartner say with a pinch of salt. They are pretty much a mouthpiece available to the highest bidder anyway.
Bull plop
Gartners obvious pro-M$ bias emerges again.
There is no way that they will beat the iPhone in that time period even if they GIVE the WinPhones away. Given their recent issues with WinPhone patches and the current raging and screaming on their forums they will not hit 1.95 percent.
Garner is usually pro-Microsoft on forecasts and not many people look back in time to see just how bad their predictions end up being.
Nokia to help WinPho outsell iOS in four years
I wonder how much Microsoft paid for this dumb prediction.
I'd be surprised if Nokia are still around if 4 years. Microsoft will have bled them dry and moved on by then.
But the figures speak for themselves ...
2010 handset sales:
- Nokia : 453M
- Apple: 47M
So Nokia sells roughly 10 handsets for every 1 Apple sells.
Even though Nokia lost a few percentage points market share, they still grew their shipments at 4.9% or about 20M units. Apple grew at 87% or about 20M units.
Let's assume both continue to sell an additional 20M units per year (Reflecting a decline in % growth for both, but 87% is unsustainable for Apple), so in 2015, units equal:
- Nokia: 553.3M
- Apple: 147.5M
If 25% of Nokia's handsets sold then are WP7 smartphones, then they match and exceed iPhone. (And my iPhone extrapolation of 20M growth per annum is a lot more generous than either IDC or Gartner).
Now assume that by 2015, ALL phones are smartphones (entry level = todays specs) and Nokia offering is entirely WP. A lot more WP than iPhones!
And that is ignoring Samsung, LG and HTC who are also selling WP.
What people seem to forget is that ALL phones will likely be 'smart' within the next few years and that on the gloabl stage, only 3.5% of handsets are iPhones. Frankly, you have to be extremely cynical not to see WP outstrip IOS over the next few years. (And, I don't think this will worry Apple, as it is like saying that Mercedes will be unhappy that more Toyotas are sold!)
