Nokia, RIM Continue To Dominate As Global Smartphone Sales Soar
Despite Apple’s mindshare, Research In Motion and Nokia (NYSE: NOK) continue to dominate the smartphone market on a global basis.
Strategy Analytics said that global smartphone shipments increased 30 percent to a record 53 million units in the fourth quarter, compared the same period a year ago. While the appetite for smartphones continues to grow, both Nokia, RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) and Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) have been able to increase their marketshare. Nokia owns roughly 39 percent of the market; RIM maintains 20 percent, and Apple is in third with 16 percent. Report.
Over the next year, the three may struggle as other handset makers begin producing competitively priced and attractive 3G devices. Neil Mawston, director at Strategy Analytics, said:
Neither Blackberry nor iPhone are one-trick ponies. Each has certain advantages over the other. The biggest difference is apps — Apple’s got 75,000 tricks, while RIM has about 2,000. And due to the more flexible UI, Apple has a much wider variety of apps, with a greater percentage oriented to average consumers (as opposed to business users).
There will always be a market for Blackberries (i.e., business-oriented phones with hardware keypads), but soon that will be a niche market. As usual, Apple is gunning for the much bigger consumer market, and will happily settle for 70% of the entire market. RIM can duke it out with Microsoft and Nokia for the remaining 30%.
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The idea that the iphone unasailable is a misconception. While they were the first western company to acknowledge the possibility that consumers as well as businesses might want smart phones, they are also failing to live up to their own press, and haven’t really innovated with the iphone since its release ( mostly just adding fetures that would have been on version 1 devices for other companies – 3G and copy/paste anyone).
With both RIM and nokia acknowledging the importance of the consumer smartphone market recently, the games about to get interesting.