Who's the Number One? NOKIA of Course!

Ever wondered what mobile phone manufacturer is the top seller? If you did, than the time for an answer has arrived and here it is: NOKIA is the phone manufacturer that had the biggest market share in 2006. Who says this? A market study made by Gartner Inc., a study saying that Nokia has managed to take a 35.1 percent slice from the mobile market cake, this representing an almost incredible number of 88.1 million units and this really is something because the next one is Motorola that "only" got 20.6 percent by selling 51.8 million handsets worldwide.

'Not that much' one would say when comparing this figure to the one attached to the Finnish manufacturer, but this becomes irrelevant after finding out how big the next slice cut from the same cake is: 12.2 percent. This third slice goes to Samsung, a company that has sold 30 million units out of a total of 251 million units sold worldwide in the third quarter and has regained the second place in Western and Eastern Europe, in the Middle East and in Africa with the help of phone models like the D900 and the E900.

The fourth one is Sony Ericsson with overall sales of 19.4 million units that represent a market share of 7.7 % and they have managed to do this by developing a larger number of products instead of focusing on a single one that might have been successful or not.

The fifth place goes to LG Mobile that took 6 percents of the market and has fell down in the third quarter mainly because of the fading success of its flagship LG KG800 Chocolate. They haven't been able to develop better alternatives to this handset and therefore have suddenly dropped behind their direct competitor, Sony Ericsson.

BenQ Siemens is almost in the exact place as LG with the difference that they have succeeded to sell only 6 million handsets or so, experiencing a market share fall after the moment when they decided to stop payments to its German subsidiary and the BenQ Mobile Germany has filed for insolvency.

Overall, Gartner said that the worldwide sales have reached 251 million units in the 2006's third quarter, a figure that has been translated as a 21.5 percent rising in sales compared to the previous quarter.

As if we didn't already know, their study also revealed that the most active part of the mobile market in the third quarter has been the Asia-Pacific region that got a share of 80.8 million units, thus experiencing a growth of 54.7 percents.