2009 Smartphone Stats Worldwide, Nokia and Symbian dominate but competition is fierce
Published by Steve Litchfield at 7:47 GMT, February 3rd 2010
Now that figures from (almost) all smartphone manufacturers are 'in' for Q4 2009, it's possible to look back over the entire year just finished. Was it an 'annus horribilis' for Nokia and for Symbian? Or was it a case of the market heading for a new equilibrium, in the face of new competition? Using figures collated by TomiAhonen Consulting and Strategy Analytics, I deliver my verdict.
(In case you were wondering, Tomi Ahonen is a respected mobile industry analyst and his figures mirror those released a few days ago by Strategy Analytics, so we can take them as reliable.)
The interesting thing here is that a whole year is taken account of, averaging out annual cycles (e.g. Christmas, Apple July release, and other factors). So we're looking at a sensible summary of the smartphone ecosystem today. You should also note that I'm mainly concentrating on 'smartphones', or what Nokia calls 'converged devices' - i.e. phones with an extensible smartphone operating system.
Here's the 2009 Worldwide Smartphone Top 4 by unit sales, according to Tomi and SA's data:
| Smartphone maker (and platform used) | World smartphones sales in 2009 | Worldwide Smartphone Market share | Change from 2008 | |
| 1 | Nokia (99% Symbian/S60) | 68 million | 39% | down 3% |
| 2 | RIM (Blackberrys) | 35 million | 20% | up 4% |
| 3 | Apple (iPhone) | 25 million | 15% | up 8% |
| 4 | HTC (Windows Mobile and Android) | 8 million | 5% | same |
| Others (Palm, ZTE, Motorola, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, LG, Fujitsu, Sharp, Kyocera) | 35 million | 21% |
A drop of 3% in the smartphone space for Nokia is perhaps not surprising, in view of the continued challenge from RIM and Apple, some of whose new customers will have come from Nokia. However, 9 of the 12 worldwide percentage points gained by those two companies, i.e. 75% of their growth came from new markets, totally new customers to smartphones. Explaining why the smartphone market as a whole continues to significantly out pace the overall phone market - more and more people are accepting smartphones as their communications and consumption device of choice.
Mind you, as a headline, "Nokia's smartphone market share drops by 3% in 2009" is a little overly negative. Its position was already so dominant that it's inconceivable that a 42% world market share could be maintained in the face of such fierce competition - people do need choice. Nokia's smartphone market share has been hovering in this region for years now and it seems 40% is an equilibrium point for it in the smartphone world.
And, as Tomi notes more than once, Nokia is still effectively as big, in terms of both phones and smartphone sales, as its next three competitors combined in each sense, emphasising its enviable position.
RIM continue to rise, with their pure focus on smartphones and (almost pure) focus on hardware qwerty keyboards - they've also been gaining mind share among the young professionals of today (a tribute to Blackberry's messaging service and social integration? the Obama factor? More the former, I suspect!). The limiting factor with RIM will be competing with touchscreen smartphones, the technology that's currently in 'fashion'. In addition, there's the Blackberry OS, parts of which date back into the last century. Can RIM rejeuvenate Blackberry OS for 2010 and beyond? I have my doubts how much further RIM will rise.
And Apple's iPhone has managed to double its world market share in a year, a tremendous achievement and a tribute to their build quality, choice of components and user interface. The limiting factor here is price, with the iPhone 3GS continuing to be a premium product. I don't see Apple's pricing changing significantly in the future and I would expect their growth to continue in linear fashion at most, perhaps reaching 20% or 22% market share by the end of 2010.
HTC have a muddled and chequered history, but there's no denying their staying power. Producing 'good enough' hardware for other people (e.g. Google and Palm) and under their own name, and based (largely) on Windows Mobile and Android, they've done enough to stay in the game, but their lack of focus and their reliance on Windows Mobile for so long has hurt them. With devices like the Magic, Hero and (yes) the Nexus One, HTC should do better in 2010, I forecast a couple of percentage points gain.
What of the 'Others'? It's a pretty sizeable group, though none individually being significant enough in smartphones to challenge the big four. Palm has shot their Web OS bolt and been let down by poor hardware, I have to feel that they're not long for this world. Sony Ericsson should do better if they can sort out the bugs in their Symbian implementations and if they get the X10 off the ground properly.
There's another table of interest here, looking at the smartphone world by platform. After all, the very definition of a smartphone relates to its ability to run an extensible OS. So here are the Worldwide Smartphone OS stats for 2009:
| Smartphone OS | Worldwide Smartphone market share for 2009* | Change from 2008 | |
| 1 | Symbian | 45% | down 12% |
| 2 | RIM Blackberry | 20% | up 4% |
| 3 | Apple iPhone | 15% | up 8% |
| 4 | Windows Mobile | 6% | down 6% |
| 5 | Android | 4% | n/a (new entry) |
| Others | 10% |
* some of these figures are not finalised, Tomi had to apply a little extrapolation. But they're close enough
Here we see again the juggernaut that was Symbian being attacked from all sides by new competitors, and it's not altogether surprising to see the 12% drop. As the phone world becomes a smartphone world, I'd expect the ever-increasing sales pie to be shared out among more and more companies trying to play a part in the ecosystem. Because the overall smartphone market is growing (reports put it at 30% per year), it's entirely possible to lose market share and still sell more smartphones.
It should also be noted that, as with hardware unit sales, there's probably a market equilibrium being approached - it was totally unrealistic in such a competitive space for Symbian to maintain a 60% world smartphone OS market share for long. With the latest generation of super-cheap Symbian touchscreen smartphones, starting from about £100 ($140) without a contract, I don't see Symbian's share dropping below 40%. Maybe 40 on the nose for the end of 2010.
And, similar to Nokia in the hardware game, Symbian's 2009 market share is, significantly, still as big as its next four competitors combined.
RIM have, I think, peaked in terms of OS market share and are in need of a big refresh on the software side. I'd expect their market share to slide slightly by the end of the year.
Apple's iPhone is a juggernaut itself, of course, in its own way, and I don't expect the improvements at Cupertino to stop coming, year on year. With multitasking finally rumoured to be coming to the iPhone in 2010, I'd expect Apple's smartphone market share to rise again, exceeding 20% by the end of 2010.
It's pretty much a given that Android will leap frog Windows Mobile during the year, I'd be surprised if Android wasn't past 10% market share by the end of 2010, with a huge number of smartphones running it having been announced over the last 6 months. Windows Mobile has been thrashing around, noisily dying for several years now, despite mouth to mouth attempts by HTC. It's still a competent business OS under the hood, but it's looking increasingly out-dated, as evidenced by every Windows Mobile licensee feeling the need to overhaul the UI - in a different way to every other licensee. It's a right royal mess and I'd expect Windows Mobile's market share to be below 3% by the end of the year - despite the imminent announcement of the increasingly irrelevant Windows Mobile 7 at MWC in two week's time.
Steve Litchfield, All About Symbian, 2 Feb 2010
Categories: Hardware, Links of Interest, Industry
Platforms: General, S60 3rd Edition, S60 5th Edition, General
News Discussion
ESP and dowsing rods anyone?
anyway, great job to nokia for being able to maintain such a huge number for so many years. symbian^3 and ^4 should increase that number back up to 42. the UI is the main reason a lot of new comers get turned away from nokia, at least over here in north america.
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Originally Posted by slitchfield
Yes, but £440 is what I mean by a 'premium' price. So is the N900. In contrast, you can now get a Nokia 5230 for less than £100, only 22% of the price. As I said a few days ago, it's all about 'range'.
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OK, so in its price range or its own particular sector of the market, we can safely say that iPhone dominates in the same way that Nokia does the overall market?
If Apple were to venture down a bit, by making a lower piced competitor in the way that they do with the Mac mini and the iPod nano, what might happen then?
Interestingly they have chosen to go in a completely new direction (as far as we know).
Seems the manufacturers are establishing their place in the world, and the battle is between Google and Apple and there is really only one likely winner given than Google's reputation as a horrible company is even worse than Apples.
If at least they will release an interface update for ALL S60v5 models they will recover some of the lost recognition.. but I don't see it very likely...
Nokia sold 4.6 million Nseries devices last quarter. You could argue that some of the 6.4 million Eseries count as high end. With that in mind the high end sales don't really look all that different between Nokia and Apple. Especially if you look outside the US (where the markets are more on a level playing field in terms of device availability / pricing). It does depend where you draw the line and you can't just ignore the low end stuff - they are important as part of platform count for things like addressable market for service providers and developers... The 'they don't count because they cheap / not smartphones' is ridiculous - do they matter as much - more open to debate possibly.
And yes Apple could venture down the market too, but its not really possible with the current platform and I don't think it fits with Apple's general strategy. They are more than happy to stay in the high end with its larger margins.
Equally you can argue about definitions, but it is always that way with stats. I think the main point of the article is that the figures very much speaksagainst the doom laden predictions that was pre-dominant in discussions of Symbian and Nokia last year.
I have iPhones for professional reasons, but I don't carry them about. They are too uncomfortably large for a start, they have poor telephony performance where signal strength is marginal (even compared to bargain basement dumb phones) and their cameras are lacking. The user interface is first class, and unrivalled of course, this is generally acknowledged. However, I don't carry a phone so I can play with its user interface, I want to be able to take calls and hear the voice at the other end.
As for the Nokia touch UI, I have got used to it and it works very well. Long learning period required compared to others, but once you get it then it is as good as anything. Not as slick, but definitely as useful. Nokia has good telephony and RF performance, solid and able to stand an impact (see Ebay for cracked/broken screen phones for sale, and screen replacement kits!!), my Nokia also has an impressive battery life by comparison.
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Originally Posted by Unregistered
Rafe, you´re missing something fundamental: from iPhone OS 3.2 (and 4.0) onwards, iPhone OS now clearly supports differente resolutions (the iPad and upcoming iPhone 4G will have different resolution than the old iPhones and iPod touches). So, unlike you say, the iPhone platform will now support "going down" the market, i.e., something like and iPhone nano can appear, and still be part of the iPhone OS ecosystem.
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(I just had to stop and think why I am discussion Apple in this thread - possibly because it is the speculation about what might happen if Apple decided to compete in the sector below iPhone directly against the Nokia XM phones).
I understand that Palm Pre sales performance in Europe is very very bad. No idea how it is doing in the US.
The elite is a limited group, and maybe one could compare it with the automobile industry. In 2000 I believe it was about 60 million vehicles sold per year, in 2008 it was 70 million, meaning it is only growing at 2-3% per year. So it´s basically only like 1% of the world´s population that buys a vehicle per year. Why so few? Because they are simply too expensive. iPhones and Blackberrys are also too expensive and to some extent Android that cannot be run on lower end devices like Symbian can.
Of course it all depends on how one define "smartphone".
And going beyond the current year, I think there will be wild cards, just like one can go back to 2006 and see all the predictions then for 2010 that was wrong so will the predictions today I´m sure be very wrong. Things can also fluctuate if one look at a longer term perspective of many years, where Nokia is leading at one point, then suddenly iPhone and Android comes out, Nokia (Symbian) lose share, then they release a completely new reingeneered user interface and some compelling mapping services etc and regain market share and so on, and suddenly Microsoft - which was discounted by many - suddenly comes out with a new very compelling mobile OS, or something completely new comes out that we now cannot guess. Anything is possible.
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Originally Posted by Unregistered
Dismiss RIM at your peril. Their OS is going to evolve rapidly this year (new webkit browser for one). They launched an app store without nokiaing it up. They're listening to developers and working with them to evolve the OS. Nokia could learn some lessons from RIM.
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Symbian is not dead, Does everyone proclaim Windows is dead when PCs run linux?
Totally baseless negative hype is being generated, particularly by US tech sites.Symbian is on a sabbatical and will get back at you,literally,in no time.
It would be pleasing to see how Android & Maemo platforms fare.
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Originally Posted by Unregistered
Blackberry is mostly for business consumers and there´s a limited amount of them, iPhone is for the "rich elite"
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But I´m thinking about the hundreds of millions of people in countries like India and China who loves Nokia (Nokia is the most trusted and loved brand in India for example) and would naturally want to upgrade to higher end Nokia´s over time, that is to Symbian devices. And I believe this will increase Symbian´s market share over time. That would be for the lower-end devices.
For the higher end devices we´ll see how much of an impact the now lower prices of Nokia devices, the free mapping/navigation service, the completely reeingineered user interface, the new SDK (building on Qt) etc will play in - on the one hand - and on the other hand, and on the other hand how much novelty we´ll see from Blackberry(OS), iPhone and Android. I happen to belive we´ll see more novelty from Nokia the coming year, and that Symbians market share will go up also in the high end market over the next two years.
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Originally Posted by Unregistered
Way off the mark. Blackberry as a messaging device is extremely popular amongst the young, which bodes well for its future. iPhone is for anyone. It's just a credit agreement and doesn't actually cost very much at all. iPhone owners come from all ends, but mostly NOT the rich elite.
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It's interesting to see other people going down this path (Motorola with MotoBLUR). Nokia is way late to the party on this one.
I guess in USD, it would be $250-$300?
My 6220c has Xenon.
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Originally Posted by slitchfield
Where did you buy it from? Was it through Nokia? Or was it through a more dubious source? Just asking...., I'm curious as to how some product codes slip through the net!
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