Smartphone sales up 12.7%

May 21, 2009 07:24 GMT  ·  By

According to a report Gartner, Inc. has recently published, the global mobile phone market has seen an 8.6 per cent decrease during the first quarter of the ongoing year, when compared to the same period a year ago, reaching a total of 269.1 million units shipped in the time frame. In addition, the report also shows that smartphone sales have seen a 12.7 per cent increase from the Q1 2008, to a total of 36.4 million units.

“There were some signs of a recovery in markets such as North America and China, but overall sales in the first quarter of 2009 registered the biggest quarter-on-quarter contraction since Gartner began monitoring the market on a quarterly basis in 2001,” said Carolina Milanesi, research director for mobile devices at Gartner, based in Egham, UK. “This was also the first time the market contracted year over year during the first quarter, a period traditionally helped by strong seasonality in the Asia/Pacific market.”

The leading mobile phone maker on the market for the first three months of the year remains Nokia, yet the company has seen its share diminished from 39.1 percent a year ago to 36.2 percent in Q1 2009. The second place went to Samsung, which managed to top 51.4 million units shipped in the quarter. At the same time, Sony Ericsson lost the fourth position on the market in favor of Motorola.

Nokia remained the leader in the smartphone segment as well, though it has seen its market share drop from 45.1 percent in Q1 2008 to 41.2 percent in the first quarter this year. RIM and Apple had great performance, both gaining more ground on the market, and the former saw its market share rise from 13.3 percent to 19.9 percent on a yearly basis, while the latter saw an increase from 5.3 percent to 10.8 percent year on year.

The report also shows that smartphone sales rose up to 13.5 percent of all mobile phone sales in the first quarter of the year, compared to the 11 percent of the sales they accounted for in the same period in 2008. According to the research firm, services and applications can be seen as having great importance for the success of smartphones, based on the positive performance Research In Motion (RIM) and Apple had.

“Much of the smartphone growth during the first quarter of 2009 was driven by touchscreen products, both in midtier and high-end devices,” said Roberta Cozza, principal analyst at Gartner, based in Egham, UK. “’Touch for the sake of touch’ was enough of a driver in the midtier space, but tighter integration with applications and services around music, mobile e-mail, and Internet browsing made the difference at the high end of the market.”

More information on what happened on the mobile phone market in the first quarter of the ongoing year, as well as detailed info on the report can be found here.