Continuous 13 percent growth for mobile phone sales

Aug 7, 2007 12:35 GMT  ·  By

The end of the second quarter has brought, along with its figures, grounds for drawing the line and making financial comparison between companies' earnings. Results reveal nothing out of the ordinary, but a steady increase in profits, with no sudden changes.

ABI Research is the one which has added all results and drawn some conclusions. Almost 264 million handsets have been sold in this year's second quarter. This means that the mobile phone market has managed to climb 13 percent over last year's results. If nothing unsuspected should happen, the second half of the year should bring larger profits, going up to a 15 percent sales increase and an overall sum of more than 1 billion sold handsets.

Results are mainly caused by the evolution of the main mobile phone producers in the world. Wireless research director Stuart Carlaw presents the raw figures that reveal the market's situation. "Nokia's market share grew by 1.4% to 37.3% in the second quarter, the largest increase in market share of all the vendors. LG and Sony Ericsson also made respectable gains of 0.8% and 0.6%. Samsung's market share increase was more muted".

Motorola, on the other hand, has been a special case this quarter, as its results have made this company lose its second place as world handset producer. Moreover, "Since Motorola has retrenched from emerging markets, and is still in the process of revamping its handset portfolio, it should not come as too much of a surprise that Motorola's handset market share shrank to 13.1% compared to 17.1% in 1Q 2007. It was only two quarters ago that Motorola's market share was 22.1%", Stuart Carlaw further observes.

Most vendors have seen a considerable price drop in their average selling price, unlike Nokia. Moreover, Samsung and LG intend to enter the Indian, Chinese and Southeast Asia markets in order to increase their reach and profits.