Smartphone biz shocker: Nokia sells fewer devices than Lenovo
And Sony outshipped HTC and RIM
More upsets from the world of smartphone manufacturing: Sony has been selling more phones than HTC, and they’re both shipping more smartphones then either RIM or Nokia - which has plunged toward the bottom of the world vendor rankings.
The latest data presented by market watcher Canalys - covering Q3 2012 - holds no surprises at the top of the chart: Samsung and Apple, with 32 per cent and 15.5 per cent of the market, respectively. Together they account for almost half of the market - in the coming quarter they're likely to take more 50 per cent.
However, we weren’t expecting to see Sony shoot into third place. Shipments of 8.8 million Xperia handsets gave it 5.1 per cent of the market during July, August and September 2012. During 2011, those months saw it rack up shipments of 6.2m units, then putting the company well behind HTC and RIM.
Not this time. HTC’s unit shipments slumped from 13.1 million to 8.4 million year on year, while RIM’s plunged from 11.8 million to 7.3 million, falls of 36.1 per cent and 38.4 per cent respectively.
HTC and RIM respectively took 4.8 per cent and 4.2 per cent of the world smartphone market in Q3 2012.
And Nokia? Oh how the mighty have fallen. Canalys, perhaps to spare the Finnish phone giant blushes, didn’t reveal Nokia’s Q3 2012 market share. It simply noted that the “struggling” manufacturer had been overtaken by LG, ZTE, Huawei and even Lenovo.
Lenovo sells well in Asia, of course - it's not a major phone maker in the West. But it's nonetheless a sign of just how far Nokia has now slumped that it's being out-shipped by a one-region player.
Nokia has pinned its hopes on Windows Phone 8, and it had to wait until October for that to arrive, and its Lumia 820 and 920 - the latter reviewed today, here - are only now, in November, shipping in volume. But it's clear its WinPho 7 offerings weren't pulling in the punters even before Nokia announced, at the start of September, details of the next-gen phones.
Maybe there will be massive consumer demand for WinPho 8 during the current quarter, and Nokia will regain its top-five placing. We can't see it, however. ®
COMMENTS
Re: A friend got a Lumia 800 yesterday
Heard it many times. Not the latest Nokia lumia but my gf' always takes her old symbian based phone, even though she pays for the calls, in preference to the lumia which her employer pays for. Why? Because the symbian works, and works for more than 10 minutes, it is easier to use, better calls, better photos and faster ui.
People write a lot of crap about symbian but it was British and if we had shouted how wonderful it was as much as the american s yell how wonderful they are people would probably still be able to buy the rather better symbian phones instead of the inferior american based replacements.
A friend got a Lumia 800 yesterday
Her comments:
I hate it, ... just want to cry, ... I want my N8 back.
Good luck Nokia.
Burning platform? Not really...
Wrecked, destroyed and ruined company. Oh how the choice of CEO has affected this company. The guy is a first rate idiot, proof if proof is needed that the rich and powerful can remain rich and powerful even when they make mistake after mistake (go and look up his 'CV' - a history of failures).
What is still incredible is that the shareholders are clearly HAPPY with this situation - their stock and investments now worthless. My guess is that most of those investors are you and I through our pension funds and similar. Investors who don't bother to hold the pension companies to account for their stupidities because we can't reasonably move what little is left of our 'investment' to a more useful company (mainly because they are all shit).
Re: I am not surprised
I bought an Xperia Ray for my wife on the understanding that it would get an Android Ice Cream Sandwich update later on in the year. Did it? Of course not. The only way you can get an official ICS build on a UK unlocked Ray is by unlocking the bootloader and destroying your warranty. The official update to ICS was also a buggy mess, as evidenced by the fact that O2 actually declined permission for Sony to roll it out.
The latest and greatest software might not be everything, but it is a lot of things for me, at least with ICS. I was relying on ICS' built-in "disable apps" feature to cut down on the insane amount of bloatware Sony install on the device - it takes up tonnes of the limited RAM. I also quite liked ICS being able to tether via Bluetooth for those occasions when I'm abroad and the hotel has limited me to one device on the wifi. Neither of those features are available on the shipped Gingerbread build.
My current plan is to wait for CM10 to be stable enough for the wife to use and then switch to that, but in the meantime I'm very disappointed with Sony. The Ray is the last Sony I'll ever buy.
Perhaps if Nokia concentrated a little less on exclusive deals and more on actually getting the handsets into peoples hands then they would sell more? The craziness of people like me having the money to buy a Lumia 920 and wanting nothing more than being able to do so but no options of actually buying one is pure insanity.
I'm there trying to hand over my cash to Nokia but Nokia isn't interested. Go figure...
