Apple, Samsung snatch smartphone biz booty
Grab all the profit, flog the most units
Who's making money selling smartphones? Apple and Samsung and… er… that's it, market watcher ABI Research said today. Together, these two raked in more than 90 per cent of the market's profits.
That's for the three months to the end of March 2012, and it's not at all bad considering the two of them only account for 55 per cent of the unit sales during the period.
Overall shipments were up 41 per cent to 144.6m units, ABI said. Samsung shipped 43m of them; Apple a further 35m. Their nearest rivals, Nokia and RIM, shipped 11.9m and 11.1m smartphones, respectively.
Sony, Huawei and ZTE rounded out the chart with shipments of 7m, 6.8m and 4.9m respectively.
Sony should watch its back. Huawei and ZTE are strong in the Chinese smartphone market, which grew more than 80 per cent in terms of unit shipments year on year. Success in China will define the winners in the smartphone arena over the coming years.
Then again, Sony does have momentum, and id at least grow it sales sequentially over Q4 2011. Samsung was the only other manufacturer to do so.
Compare that to Nokia, which saw a 40 per cent decline in shipments quarter on quarter. RIM's shipments fell 20 per cent.
The prognosis for Nokia is not good. “Nokia will have to grow its Windows Phone business 5000 per cent in 2012 just to offset its declines in Symbian shipments,” said ABI senior analyst Michael Morgan. ®
COMMENTS
Nokia is doomed...
and it's a shame because the MeeGo-running N9 and Symbian Belle FP1-running 701 are both bloody good phones. It's impossible to believe that Nokia would be doing this badly if it was pushing those two handsets as it's flagship and mid-range smartphones respectively rather than the Lumia 800/900 and 610/710.
I see this ending badly for Elop, maybe even with the courts looking at his role in it all. Running a company onto the rocks so his ex-employer can pick it up for a few pence surely can't be legal.
Re: Nokia is doomed...
Of course it would be possible to believe that Nokia would be doing badly with another platform.
They put a huge amount of effort into trying to remove their huge dominance of the phone market, they have the skills to continue to fail with any platform.
That says it all about where WP is and where its (not) going
“Nokia will have to grow its Windows Phone business 5000 per cent in 2012 just to offset its declines in Symbian shipments,”
Re: How are Motorola and HTC not mentioned?
Lots of companies sell smartphones.
Two companies currently make money doing so, evidently.
Instead of saying lets share our market position, both Apple and Samsung are continually at each others throats. It would be great if a third party to could come up with something that can compete, but Symbian is dying, Rim has a terminal illness and Windows appears still born.
