14 DAY TRIAL // Besides being one of the largest mobile markets in the world, the US one is also among the most interesting. While Europe, like most of the world, is dominated by Nokia, Motorola's home-country seems to have its own mobile ways.
The US handset sales figures for the first quarter of 2008 recently came out and, according to MocoNews, Motorola keeps on holding the first position, with 27% from the total of 31 million mobile phones sold. This means the US consumers bought, in the first quarter of this year, about 8.5 million Moto handsets - about one third of the total number of Motorola mobile devices sold worldwide in the same period.
The second place in the "mobile hearts" of US users was taken by Samsung (with 18%), which also has the second place when reporting to the worldwide sales. Maybe a bit surprising, on the third place we have LG (the other important South Korean manufacturer besides Samsung), which managed to ship in the US about 17 percent of the handsets rolled-out in Q1 2008.
Nokia, the world's largest mobile phone manufacturer, comes on the fourth place, with 8 percent of the total, meaning that only about 2.6 million Nokia phones were bought across the US in 2008's first quarter. This clearly shows that the Finnish giant still has a lot to work on in order to conquer the US.
Probably more surprisingly than LG's third position is the fifth one taken by Canada's Research in Motion, which "stole" the position from Sanyo. 5 percent of the handsets sold Stateside in Q1 2008 were BlackBerry smartphones, hence we're talking about more than 1.5 million devices. Considering the fact that, unlike all the other manufactures in the "US mobile top", RIM doesn't have any handset that can pass as being affordable, the 1.5 million mark is quite impressive.
Another interesting aspect about the 2008 Q1 US mobile sales is that, as compared to the same period of 2007, users bought 22 percent less mobile devices. Furthermore, there were 10 percent more smartphones sold, which shows the market's growing tendency towards advanced devices.
As you can see, Apple didn't make it in the US top five, despite the huge popularity of its iPhone. Maybe when the 3G iPhone is released, things will be different. Until then, the reality is that Moto is still number one, while Korean-made phones become more and more popular in the US.