Samsung: 'We'll nick Nokia's global mobe crown this year'
Cocky S Korean biz bats aside Apple in race to the top
Posted in Management, 10th January 2012 14:03 GMT
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CES 2012 Samsung is feeling confident that it can ship more handsets than Nokia this year, making it pretty much the top mobile phone company in the world.
The South Korean firm has already surpassed Apple as the world's biggest smartphone maker, so if it can overtake Nokia in all handsets, it will take the lead in the competitive field.
Samsung chief executive Choi Gee-Sung told Reuters at CES in Las Vegas that his company was already making more revenue than the Finnish firm, as of its last reported quarter, and he thought Sammy could top Nokia's shipments this year.
In the third quarter last year, according to beancounting firm Gartner, Samsung shipped 78.6 million handsets as opposed to Nokia's 105.4 million. However, the gap between the two was already narrowing: in the third quarter the year before, Nokia sent out 117.5 million phones and Samsung handed over 71.7 million.
Samsung's mobile business has come along in leaps and bounds, mostly due to the popularity of its Android-packing Galaxy range of smartphones.
The South Korean consumer electronics giant is locked in a wide-ranging, global patent dispute with Apple over the aforementioned handsets, which the fruity firm asserts are "slavish" copies of the iPhone. So far, however, the courtroom showdowns aren't hitting Samsung's sales, with wins and losses on both sides more or less cancelling each other out and the media coverage only aiding Sammy's marketing.
While the smartphone market is pretty much a two-horse race now between Samsung and Apple, with HTC and Research in Motion as well as Nokia losing ground all through last year, in terms of overall handset figures, Nokia is clinging on to the lead - don't forget its cheaper handsets are still popular in the developing world.
However, despite a partnership with Microsoft on smartphones and repeated attempts to make a comeback, Nokia has failed to ignite enough passion for its high-end models.
Even so, if Samsung manages to overtake the Finnish firm, it'll be a coup for a company. Sammy barely existed in the mobile market a few years ago yet could topple the market's leader of the last 14 years. ®
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COMMENTS
It's not hard to over take a horse that's been shot in the head with a cannon by its owner.
Windows Phone OS = dead in the water
nokia & ms are taking a nosedive recently since MS announced a few days ago that all updates of WinPhone OS will be provided by CARRIERS only
http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone/b/windowsphone/archive/2012/01/06/new-maintenance-release-for-windows-phone.aspx
you won't get access to updates directly from MS unless your carrier says so and they won't say so because they don't make any money from a free os update, their interest is to push you to PAY and change your phone... this is a quote from a comment there:
<quote>
They have no intentions on rolling out the update.
They very kindly asked me if I (and for that matter the other 3 members of my family who have the same phones) would like to terminate our contracts and get shiny new Nokia phones where they would be pushing the update out on to at a cost of £350.00 per phone which makes a stagering total of £1400.
</endquote>
Smartphones are becoming the default
With increasing mob phone processing power Android is making headway into the cheaper, formerly 'non-smart' market. I wonder how long the cheap segment will remain free from Android: the hardware is only getting cheaper and focusing on Android would save companies from having to use Symbian or their own non-smart phone OS.
Check Gartner's numbers: Nokia's sales are dropping rapidly, from 28.2% market share a year ago to 23.9% last quarter. Android's smartphone market share more than doubled from 25.3% to 52.5%.
And despite El Reg's WinPhone marketing fluff, I don't see how Nokia will be able to turn the tide. We're quickly heading towards an Android world with Samsung comfortably in the lead.
I for one welcome our Korean-Mountainview Penguin overlords!
They might both make WinPhones, but those aren't the big sellers. For Nokia the big sellers are the cheap not very smart phones based on their older OS(s), and for Samsung it's Android.
HTC also started as WinPhone manufacturer, and nobody had heard of them. You've heard of them now, but that's not due to their success of windows mobile handsets.
Those former Symbian owners
had to go somewhere for their next upgrade - seeing as they seem to prefer Android to iOS or WP7, someone like Samsung was the obvious beneficiary.
Not sure how Nokia will manage to survive on the crumbs they will be picking up from WP7 once the vast majority of their Symbian customers have made the transition to Android. Such a shame, as MeeGo-Harmattan was the *perfect* upgrade for former Symbian users.
Nokia RIP.
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