A recently published study from ABI Research shows that next year won't be such a bad one for mobile phone makers after all, at least when compared to the ongoing one, when the industry is expected to see a drop in handset sales. According to the research firm, we should be able to see a flat growth in 2010 in mobile phone sales, which comes as rather good news compared to the 8 percent fall that is predicted for 2009.

In addition to the predicted growth, the company also states that there will be some markets that are expected to perform much better than others, such as the Middle East and Africa, although the sale volumes in those areas are rather small. At the same time, the region that will be impacted the most during the ongoing year will be Asia-Pacific, mostly because of the fact that shipments will be lowered a lot, in the context in which the area has the largest shipment volumes in the world, three times larger than the next big region. In addition, the firm also says that the stabilization will most likely come to the area later than in North America and Europe.

Kevin Burden from ABI Research stated that there would be some signs that some parts of the handset ecosystem would be on their way to stabilization. “Many handset vendors are replacing component inventories after reducing them to very low levels in recent months to keep from overextending as the market dropped. This doesn’t necessarily mean the whole market is doing better, but it is good news at least for the component suppliers, some of which were really suffering,” he added.

According to him, during the following year we will not see significant growth in the mobile phone market, but no decline in shipments will be registered either. Basically, in 2010, the entire market will remain on a flat growth line, which “would actually be a good outcome: the beginning of the upswing back to a more stable growth pattern,” he stated. The entire “Mobile Device Market Share Analysis and Forecasts” report is available on ABI Research’s website.