14 DAY TRIAL // Gartner has published yesterday a market study concerning the sales of smartphones during the fourth quarter of the last year, as well as those of the said devices for the entire 2008. As anyone would expect, Nokia still occupies the first position on the chart, with a 43.7 percent market share for the last twelvemonth, while its Symbian platform accounts for 52.4 percent of the worldwide market.
The fourth quarter of the last year was not a great one for most mobile phone makers, as the smartphone sales during the timeframe only managed to rise 3.7 percent compared to the fourth quarter of 2007, up to 38.1 million units. At the same time, this also affected the worldwide sales for the entire following year, as the registered growth was of 13.9 percent from the previous one, to a total of 139.3 million devices sold.
When compared with the overall sales of mobile phones, the smartphone segment remained a strong one, and also got to see a small growth, remaining stable at 12 percent of sales during the fourth quarter of 2008, compared to the 11 percent a year before. At the same time, the top five vendors chart registered changes, as Samsung managed to take Sharp's position during Q4. Nokia saw a drop in volume sales during the timeframe, while RIM increased its shipments.
In the operating system area, Symbian's market share dropped during the last four months of the last year to 47.1 percent, compared with the 62.3 percent share in Q4 2007. This decrease is the result of a weakness in the Japanese mobile device market, and sales were also affected by the pressure other platforms that newly entered the consumer space made. RIM's OS grew on a yearly basis from 10.9 percent up to 19.5 percent. According to Gartner, 20 percent of the total Linux sales in the fourth quarter of 2008 were registered by Android smartphones.
“After a strong third quarter with new product introductions, sequential growth slowed down again in the fourth quarter as fewer compelling new products and the worsened economic climate continued to make data plans associated with smartphones out of reach for most consumers,” Roberta Cozza, research director at Gartner, said. “In general in 2008, the focus from vendors and operators on increasing their smartphone portfolios remained very strong. Samsung, RIM, HTC and Apple saw their volumes and share increase during 2008, thanks to their ability to offer compelling device experiences and touch interfaces.”