14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system has enjoyed some strong quarters lately, when it has managed to increase its market share to over 10 percent in the big five European markets (UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain), but it seems that it didn’t do so well over the last month, Kantar says.
According to the latest report coming from the research firm, the platform dropped to only 8.1 percent market share at the end of May, though it remained in the top three list, behind Android and iOS (with 73.3 percent and 16.6 percent, respectively).
Compared to the same month a year ago, however, Microsoft’s mobile operating system is doing well, as it grew its share on the smartphone area by 1 percentage point.
To be more precise, the platform was loaded only on 7.1 percent of all smartphones in top five European countries last year.
According to the aforementioned report from Kantar, Windows Phone actually lost ground in China and the United States YOY. It dropped from 3 percent market share to only 0.6 percent in the former, and went from 4.7 percent to 3.8 percent in the US in May.
In Australia and Japan, the operating system continued to grow steadily, up to 6.7 percent and 1.4 percent share, respectively. Last year in May, it was present on 5 percent smartphones in Australia, and on only 0.5 percent of them in Japan.
In Europe, Germany was the only country where Windows Phone registered decline in May when compared to the same month last year, going from 6.2 percent to 5.9 percent market share.
However, it grew from 7.9 percent to 9.1 percent in the UK, went up from 8.7 percent to 10.5 percent in France, and increased its market share from 9.7 percent to 9.9 percent in Italy. In Spain, it saw the largest increase, from 2.1 percent in May last year to 5.4 percent in May 2014.
Overall, it seems that Windows Phone’s growth still continues, though at a slower pace. However, considering the fact that no new smartphones running under the OS arrived on shelves this year until only several weeks ago, chances are that things will turn for the better shortly.
In fact, we might actually see the platform growing even faster than before, given that more mobile phone makers out there are preparing the release of Windows Phone 8.1 devices for this summer.
In the meantime, however, we should also note that sales of Windows Phone devices in April and May were affected by the release of Samsung Galaxy S5 worldwide. According to Kantar, the handset also hurt sales of Apple’s iPhone in the timeframe.
You can learn more on Kantar’s findings in this PDF document.