Symbian market share analysis from ABI

[slitchfield]

Market analysts ABI Research have predicted a gradual fall in Symbian's smartphone market share, resulting in 46% of the total market by 2012 (down from the current 73%), due to increased competition, especially from Linux (i.e. open source)-based devices. The numbers sound about right, although 46% of the size of the smartphone market in five years time is going to be a LOT. ABI's press release is below...

Read on in the full article.

[Rafe]

Interesting number. Of course it quite hard to predict the future.

Its interesting to see reports that now see more of a future for Symbian (e.g. this report which predicted 22% for Symbian by 2010). 2012 is of course even further away but 46% is reasonable (I would estimate anywhere from 40-60% personally) as there are so many variables to consider.

Of course there's also fragmentation to consider. I would be surprised if one Linux software platform (one as in Symbian is one platform) emerges as dominant (the signs may be there however by 2012) given there are quite a few potential competitors at the moment (ACCESS, LiMO, OSDL, TrollTech etc. etc.)

[langdona]

I wonder why anyone pays any attention to the market analyst forecasts. They never seem to be based on anything more than an educated guess at best and an uneducated one at worst.

What I'd like to see is an analysis of their past predictions too see how accurate they were. I would be surprised if they are any better than chance.

So what do I think the smartphone market share is going to be in 2012? I haven't got a clue!

It will be interesting to see why they think Windows Mobile will gain, when from other figures (Canalys?) it has lost market share in recent years.

[krisse]

I would love to see analysts get into the habit of publishing their predictions from five or ten years ago, just so we can get an idea of how accurate they are.

Even predictions twelve months in advance are usually wrong in many important ways, as you can tell from almost any technology website's end-of-year predictions.

Having said that, it does seem extremely likely Linux will grow market share in the future because Linux is big in developing countries and it's developing countries where most of the growth in phones is already coming from. Whatever they decide to use in India and China will be the worldwide standard, it won't matter what the rest of the world says or does.

[rbrunner]

Whatever they decide to use in India and China will be the worldwide standard, it won't matter what the rest of the world says or does.

Uh, please forgive me to ask, but isn't this just one of these analyst-style predictions as well, trying to reach many years out, with a corresponding chance of being correct? I think it is far from a given that the sheer mass of Indian and Chinese users will already make their standards worldwide standards as well.

Maybe this is not fully comparable, but look at the situation today: Europe uses Symbian on its smartphones, and pretty much everything else is niche, and the US uses everything else to a certain degree, but Symbian is niche. Neither "block" seems to influence the other one much, at least at the moment.

Symbian has a large share of the Japanese market and is doing very well indeed in China. So no worries about that.