14 DAY TRIAL // Market research firm Kantar Worldpanel has recently published an overview of the smartphone OS sales share for the last year and it looks like Windows Phone remained third operating system on the market, after Android and iOS.
However, it appears that Windows Phone presence in some regions is starting to fade in comparison with last month, according to the numbers published in the survey.
Even though Windows Phone had around 10.3% market share in Europe in February 2013, it only managed to amass 8.3% in March 2014.
The main problem seems to the fact that Nokia did not release any new smartphones this year yet, but we expect these numbers to surge next month when the first Windows Phone 8.1 devices should go on sale.
According to the numbers, the UK market share for Windows Phone decreased from 11.3% in February to 9.1% in March, while in Italy Microsoft’s mobile platform had a huge drop from 17% to only 9.6% last month.
In France, Windows Phone had a 13.9% market share in February, but dropped to 8.3% last month due to the same reason, lack of new devices that would make current users upgrade to newer models or Android, iOS users that would want to switch to Windows Phone.
The good news is Windows Phone overall market share in Europe is slightly higher in comparison with last year when Microsoft’s mobile platform had 10.3% market share.
Even with the current decline, Windows Phone is still on the rise if we compare year-over-year market share in some of the most important European countries for the operating system.
For example, in the UK, Windows Phone had 7% market share in March 2013 and managed to rise up to 9.1% in March 2014.
In Germany, Windows Phone increased only slightly from 6.1% last year, to 6.6% in 2014. French customers bought more Windows Phone devices in March 2014 than one year ago. According to Kantar data, Windows Phone market share increased in France from 7.2% in 2013 to 8.3% this year.
Last but not least, Windows Phone had a slight increase in Spain from 1.3% to 3%, but remains one of the smaller markets for the platform from the top 5 European countries.
As we mentioned earlier, we expect these numbers to increase in the next couple of weeks due to the launch of the first Windows Phone 8.1 handsets, Lumia 630, Lumia 635 and Lumia 930.