Symbian OS now powers 7% of all phones sold

Published by Steve Litchfield at 9:40 UTC, February 12th 2008

Symbian chose to wait until MWC before releasing their own Q4 results for 2007 and the full press release is quoted below. There's also a video webcast to stream if you want to see Symbian's CEO and CFO go through the numbers in person. Standout highlights include the fact that Symbian OS now powers around 7% of all phones being sold worldwide (up from 5%), with just over 22 million Symbian OS-powered smartphones shipped in Q4/2007.

BARCELONA, Spain and LONDON, United Kingdom - 12 February, 2008 - Symbian Limited, developer and licensor of Symbian OS™, the market-leading operating system for mobile phones, today released the following unaudited financial and operational figures for the fourth quarter and the full year ended 30 December 2007:

Symbian Limited unaudited Q4 2007 financial highlights

Total Symbian smartphone models shipping at end Q4 2007

Symbian Limited unaudited end of year 2007 financial highlights

Highlights - Full year 2007, at 31 December 2007

• 77.3 million Symbian smartphones shipped to consumers worldwide in 2007 - a 50% increase on 2006 (51.7m)
• 188 million cumulative Symbian smartphone shipments since the formation of Symbian to 31 December 2007
• 68 mobile phones based on Symbian OS commenced shipment in 2007 through 250 major network operators by 8 licensees including Fujitsu, LG, Mitsubishi, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, Sharp, and Sony Ericsson, a 4.6% increase on 2006 (65 models)
• Of these models, 49 (72%) were based on Symbian OS v9, 46 (68%) for use on W-CDMA/ HSDPA (3G) and 20 (29%) were GPS enabled
• Symbian OS v9.3 is the latest version on Symbian OS to ship in devices (November 2007). Symbian OS v9.3 is optimized for convergence with performance and feature enhancements
• 8,736 third-party Symbian applications are now commercially available, a 27% increase on 31 December 2006 (6,896 applications) Source: Symbian research, see Notes to Editors

Nigel Clifford, Symbian CEO, commented:

"I am very pleased to report continued growth for Symbian throughout 2007 with a total of 77.3 million mobile phones based on Symbian OS in 2007, 22.4m shipments in Q4 alone. In 2007, Symbian's total revenues grew to £194.3 million - an increase of 17% on 2006.

Symbian aims to grow its share of the mobile phone market by increasingly driving Symbian OS into mid-range phone segments while maintaining the leading high end feature set used in the most advanced phones. Assuming Strategy Analytics' total global phone market of 1.13 billion in 2007, Symbian's share of the market grew from 5% in 2006, to 7% in 2007.

Since the first shipment of a Symbian phone in 2000 the world's leading handset manufacturers have shipped a total of 188 million phones based on Symbian OS. They continue to benefit from Symbian's lead in performance, features and power efficiency for the converged mobile phone market. They are also benefiting from the scalability of Symbian OS, deploying it in mass market phones to help differentiate their devices and deliver faster shipment times-to-market."

2007 - Q4 Shipments and new models

In Q4 2007 22.4 million Symbian OS based phones were shipped, representing a 53% increase on Q4 2006 (14.6m). 20 new models based on Symbian OS commenced shipment in Q4 2007, bringing the total number of models in the market at the end of Q4 2007 to 141 and a total of 222 models shipped since the formation of Symbian. These cover a broad range of market segments and form factors. Some of the new Symbian smartphones launched in Q4 2007 include: FOMA™ D905i, FOMA SH905i, FOMA F905i, FOMA SO905i, FOMA F801i, Nokia N95 8GB, Nokia 6110 Navigator China, Nokia E51, Nokia N82, Nokia N81 8GB, Samsung i450, Samsung i550, and Samsung i400, and Sony Ericsson W960i.

There are now 8,736 third party Symbian applications commercially available, an increase of 27% on 31 December 2006 (6,896 applications).

2007 - Technology highlights

During 2007, Symbian announced new Symbian OS technologies aimed at continuing Symbian's position at the leading edge of mobile computing, including:

• In January, Symbian introduced P.I.P.S. - 'P.I.P.S. Is POSIX on Symbian' - enabling C programmers to more easily migrate existing middleware and applications, either commercial or open source POSIX libraries on Symbian OS. P.I.P.S. will significantly reduce the effort required to migrate existing desktop and server components, and mobile applications from other platforms, onto Symbian OS. This will help broaden and deepen application development for Symbian OS and help improve developer productivity.
  http://www.symbian.com/news/pr/2007/pr20078721.html
• At CTIA in March, Symbian announced Symbian OS v9.5 which offers customers high performance features designed for a richer user experience as well as significant savings to phone build costs, delivering the only truly scalable mobile OS for the global market. Symbian OS v9.5 offers benefits in the areas of performance and power usage: reducing device boot time and start-up time of popular applications such as browser, email and navigation by up to 75%, in addition to significant improvements to high-speed networking and graphics capabilities.
  http://www.symbian.com/news/pr/2007/pr20078925.html
• At the Symbian Smartphone show in October 2007, taking full advantage of the increasing convergence of desktop technologies and internet services with Symbian OS devices, Symbian announced new visionary technologies that give the industry the power to create devices that can handle and store large amounts of data, provide a responsive, emotionally engaging user experience, and deliver very high-speed networking while maintaining excellent battery performance.
  http://www.symbian.com/news/pr/2007/pr20079463.html
  • FreeWay is the new and unrivalled IP networking architecture in Symbian OS, designed to deliver the capability for very high speed networks, high quality audio/video streaming and crystal-clear VoIP calls.
  • ScreenPlay is the new graphics architecture in Symbian OS which is designed to integrate high definition video content, life-like games and animations and significantly enhance content presentation.
  • Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) on Symbian OS will offer exceptional multicore performance for media-rich applications as well as the power efficiency required to continue to deliver industry leading battery life.

2007 - Regional highlights

Japan

Symbian announced in January 2008 that by the end of November 2007, over 30 million Japanese mobile phones based on Symbian OS have shipped in Japan. To date, a total of 69 models have launched in Japan by six of our customers: Fujitsu, Mitsubishi, Motorola, Nokia, Sharp and Sony Ericsson.

Nigel Clifford continued:
"Symbian's Japanese customers and partners are of clear strategic importance to Symbian. The Japanese market is very advanced in showing consumers the potential of mobile phones."

China

In January 2007 Symbian expanded its sales and marketing presence in Beijing and in August, opened a global R&D center in the city. In November, Symbian completed the transfer of management and software engineers from MoGenesis. The Chinese R&D center is Symbian's fourth with two located in the United Kingdom and one in India. It plays a key role in the Company's continued development of Symbian OS. Symbian has focused heavily on the Symbian Academy program in China with close collaboration with nine local universities. The Symbian Academy is designed to assist and encourage universities creating courses that teach Symbian software development and to introduce a Symbian program into existing computer science courses.

"The new R&D center in Beijing will contribute significantly to the Symbian OS roadmap to meet the needs of our customers today as well as the demands of the global mass market for the next generation of converged mobile devices," said Nigel Clifford.

Symbian Outlook

Analysts are predicting 1 billion mobile phones based on an advanced open operating system will be in the market by end of 2011 - which is excellent news for Symbian's ecosystem and Symbian itself. Symbian considers the overall phone market to be its field of play and is looking to continue to increase its share of the mobile phone market, currently at 7%.

"I am very excited by the potential in this marketplace - in terms of technology, market size, market trends and our position in the market," says Nigel Clifford. "With, insights and commitment from the world's leading handset vendors, continued success in major markets such as Japan and China, and a vibrant ecosystem as demonstrated at the October Symbian Smartphone Show and the November Symbian Tokyo Summit, I am determined that Symbian will continue to lead the smartphone market and grow our share of the overall mobile market."

"We look forward to an exciting year ahead with new innovative, differentiated and attractive phones in the pipeline for many market segments and regions".

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Originally Posted by krisse It depends how you look at it! :-) 7% is a lot when you consider that it's 7% of ALL phone sales, including the cheapest and simplest models, and over 1 billion phones are sold every year. You also have to remember that 90% of phone users don't use any kind of smartphone at all, so getting 7% of the total phone market means getting 70% of the smartphone market. I agree that smartphones are something of a red herring though, the really significant phone models are the ones that are cheap enough for anyone to afford, even people in relatively poor countries.

7% may represent a large absolute number, but from a developer's perspective, it is a small percentage. A lot of those non-smartphones can also run s/w applications (those that run brew, for example) and the difference between 7% and 93% is massive (not that 93% is a single platform, but still) - so much so that it's almost pointless to even consider developing the 7%.

I wonder how the 93% is split up - that might be a more significant comparison.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ajck 7% may represent a large absolute number, but from a developer's perspective, it is a small percentage. A lot of those non-smartphones can also run s/w applications (those that run brew, for example) and the difference between 7% and 93% is massive (not that 93% is a single platform, but still) - so much so that it's almost pointless to even consider developing the 7%. Not true. If you were familiar with cross platform mobile development you'd realise this is still hugely significant. There are enough Symbian powered phones in the world nowadays to make it a very significant platform to develop for - the other end of the scale from "pointless".

Well, perhaps my statement was a little strong, but it is still far from the biggest platform, at least in some markets.

How long that will remain true (if indeed it is true - I have no data to quote either way) is another matter - I hope it will change too.

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If you were experienced in mobile, you'd know that although 93% vs. 7% looks enormously attractive, you are extremely limited in development options to hit any significant mass of these 93% of other phones.

Well, I already mentioned BREW, which already has a larger market share than Symbian, but...

Quote:

You basically have two choices - very limited mobile web pages made of WAP or XHTML with just text and limited graphics, and no animation, let alone a proper "program", or java which is the most fragmented nightmare on the planet to develop for, and where you can only hit a minor subset of phones, without vast time, effort and money spent on porting and debugging on individual handset models. Some 50% of java development costs are spent on this these days. Symbian offer power and a stable and very capable platform, and they belong to premium users, who are more likely to spend more on extra software, and are known to have significantly higher data and browsing usage.

Indeed, what you say has *some* truth, in that the development on Symbian is much better than most of the established platforms[1] with (some of) the others requiring customisation between phones. However, to sugest that the others are limited to just basic web pages is wrong. One of my company's applications had full 3D OpenGL ES graphics (written in C++) on a largish number of brew phones (ie not smartphones) - it works and is impressive. It *is* possible to innovate on basic phones despite their limitations.

IMO, it all comes down to business models and marketing. Since the Symbian market is so small, it is quite difficult to charge little or nothing for an application and/or content. Our model for our S60 application (even smaller than Symbian) has been to give the application away for free, but charge for the content that you can use in the application (as well as some teasers). This has quite a lot of advantages from a marketing perspective (similar to a demo, but permanent), but some things make it impractical. The small Symbian market means we can't get to the huge numbers needed to make a profit, and also there seems to be no easy way to charge customers for cheap content while keeping costs low (ie royalty based) and making it easy for the customer. The only way to do this that we've found is to distribute via a service provider and that really limits the scope, not to mention that you have to fit in with their way of doing things/etc/etc, which means more engineering and maintenance costs, not to mention other factors like them choosing to not do business with you at all (like in Japan).

I was really hoping that this new Nokia advertising powered download thing would work for what we want to do - it had the promise of being completely free for the user (ie *very* easy to buy) and a single service provider (low engineering/maintenance). This is what I'm talking about.
Unfortunately, after the beta, things seem to have gone quiet - the one comment is mine :|

So, yes, I pretty much agree with you in so much as it's not nearly as black and white as I made out, and my comment really only applies to my company's business model for it's S60 application (well, perhaps others too). It's just been a headache, that's all.

Max.

[1] it is still far from ideal, and, IMO, will (I hope) be surpassed in that respect by other more recent platforms.

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