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This is a research of Gartner on worldwide mobile phone sales and rankings given to the manufacturers as well as OS. I thought I need to share this with you.

Worldwide mobile phone sales to end users totalled 314.7 million units in the first quarter of 2010, a 17 per cent increase from the same period in 2009, according to Gartner, Inc. Smarpthone sales to end users reached 54.3 million units, an increase of 48.7 per cent from the first quarter of 2009. Among the most successful vendors were those that controlled an integrated set of operating system (OS), hardware and services.

“In the first quarter of 2010, smartphone sales to end users saw their strongest year-on-year increase since 2006,” said Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at Gartner. “This quarter saw RIM, a pure smartphone player, make its debut in the top five mobile devices manufacturers, and saw Apple increase its market share by 1.2 percentage points. Android’s momentum continued into the first quarter of 2010, particularly in North America, where sales of Android-based phones increased 707 per cent year-on-year.

Growth in the mobile devices market was driven by double-digit growth of smartphone sales in mature markets, helped by wider product availability as well as mass market price tags. “Increasing sales of white-box products in some emerging regions, in particular India, also drove sales of mobile phones upward. We expect sales of white-box products to remain very healthy for the remainder of 2010, especially outside of China,” said Ms Milanesi.

The first quarter also saw some movement outside the top five mobile handset vendor rankings (see Table 1), Hong Kong-based manufacturer G-Five made its debut into the top 10, grabbing 1.4 per cent of market share in the first quarter of 2010. The rise of white-box manufacturers from Asia has also helped the “others” section, as a proportion of overall sales, increase its market share to 19.20 per cent in the first quarter of 2010, up 2.7 percentage points. “This is having a profound effect on the top five mobile handset manufacturers’ combined share that dropped from 73.3 in the first quarter of 2009 to 70.7 per cent in the first quarter of 2010,” said Ms Milanesi.

Table 1
Worldwide Mobile Terminal Sales to End Users in 1Q10 (Thousands of Units)

Source: Gartner (May 2010)

In the first quarter of 2010, Nokia’s mobile phone sales to end users reached 110.1 million units, a 1.2 per cent decline in market share year-on-year. Although Nokia’s midtier products sold well, Nokia lacks a high-volume driver in the high-end. “MeeGo based devices and other high-end products will not rejuvenate Nokia’s premium portfolio until the end of the third quarter of 2010 at the earliest, and Nokia will continue to feel pressure on its average selling price (ASP) from vendors such as HTC, RIM and Samsung,” said Ms Milanesi. The reorganisation announced last week demonstrated that Nokia is trying to streamline the reporting process to deliver results quickly, which we believe shows its recognition of the pressure it faces from investors.

Samsung sold 64.9 million devices in the first quarter of 2010, an increase of 26.3 per cent year-on-year. Samsung was one of the five vendors in the top10 vendors ranking to grow its market share, which increased by 1.5 percentage points year-on-year. Samsung saw healthy margins in the first quarter of 2010 and was also able to grow its presence in developing markets such as India and the Commonwealth of Independent States.

RIM’s mobile phone sales reached 10.6 million units in the first quarter of 2010, a 45.9 per cent increase year-on-year. RIM is making its debut into the top five worldwide mobile handset manufacturers ranking. RIM’s focus this quarter was centred on its ecosystem strategy, its tightly integrated control of store, OS and device played to RIM’s strengths.

Sony Ericsson sold enough units to remain in the top five mobile handset manufacturers, but its market share declined 2.3 percentage points in the first quarter of 2010. The channel held some inventory for Sony Ericsson in the first quarter of 2010 as some new products reached the channel late into the quarter. One of Sony Ericsson’s most important future differentiators is its relationship with its parent company, Sony. This partnership, combined with Sony Ericsson’s ownership of the strongest portfolio it has had since 2007, place it well to lead the trend toward increasingly connected consumer devices.

The first quarter of 2010 was Apple’s strongest quarter yet, which placed the company in the No. 7 position with a 112.2 per cent increase in mobile devices sales. “Growth came partly from new communication service providers in established markets, such as the UK, and stronger sales in new markets such as China and South Korea,” said Ms Milanesi. “The second quarter of 2010 will be a very important one for Apple. We expect that Apple will present its new iPhone in June during its Worldwide Developer Conference, which will be the first to feature the latest release of the iPhone OS that includes welcome improvements for developers and users, such as multitasking.”

In the smartphone OS market, Android and Apple were the winners in the first quarter of 2010 (see Table 2). Android moved to the No. 4 position displacing Microsoft Windows Mobile for the first time. Both Android and Apple were the only two OSs vendors among the top five to increase market share year-on-year. Symbian remained in the No. 1 position but continued to lose as Nokia remains weak in the high-end portfolio.

Smartphones accounted for 17.3 per cent of all mobile handset sales in the first quarter of 2010, up from 13.6 per cent in the same period in 2009.

As seen with the iPad and web books based on Google’s Android platform, mobile OS ecosystems are developing and will move beyond smartphones to continue to deliver consumer value and a rich user experience,” said Roberta Cozza, principal research analyst at Gartner.

Table 2
Worldwide Smartphone Sales to End Users by Operating System in 1Q10 (Thousands of Units)

Source: Gartner (May 2010)

Mobile e-mail, rich messaging and social networking will continue to drive demand for smartphones and enhanced phones that feature full qwerty hardware keyboards. “To compete in such a crowded market, manufacturers need to tightly integrate hardware, user interface, and cloud and social networking services if their solutions are to appeal to users,” said Ms Cozza. “Just adding a qwerty keyboard will not make a device fit the communication’s habits of today’s various consumer segments.”

The morale of the research would be to understand the domain of mobile marketing and effectively utilize the advantage to our marketing efforts.

Earlier, we were using mobiles for making calls and just to stay in touch. It was even luxurious and unaffordable in the mid segment customers. Now, having a mobile is no more a luxury, besides it has become necessity.

Mobile is no more used only for calls, it is being used for more than that. Every consumer wants to have the power of mobility with him. He wants to order pizza on the go, book tickets for a movie on the go, want to Google on the mobile, want to pay his bills from his mobile and what not!!!!!!!!. We want everything on the fly because we lack only one thing now a days and that is time.

Probably this was best understood by the Mobile OEM companies in the right sense who are eagerly looking out for continuous innovation. Yes, then there entered something called business phones which are supposed to be only for the C Level Executives in the early stage of its evolution. You do only business work like  checking only important emails, and open spreadsheets and do numbers of Total revenue and Net profit that bothers them always ( Hope the usage of BlackBerry had no impact on increase of revenue but yes I have to agree that for sales guys it had impacted to identify the person if he is a decision maker or not). As everybody knows that  RIM has best understood this strategy, and BlackBerry has become a luxurious tool for C-Level Executives.

In the continuous evolution process,  when many of the mobile OEM’s are coming up with low price strategy to enter into development markets, some innovative guys like Steve Jobs, whose another name itself is innovation has probably some day woke up and said to himself ” I want to build iPhone “. Hope the letter “i” is very rhythmic in sense with innovation or Steve. If we look at his brands that has brought Apple to a huge limelight the iPod, iPhone, iPad, iStore, iTunes have brought him much more fame than “Mac” ( Of Course outside US). Now a days we have started speaking about iPhone a lot and who knows the better revenue model other than Steve. Even if he opens a App Store we know that there is a revenue  model for Apple and he wants his customers to be loyal to his products because of the abundance of Apps. Hmmm, probably this is the marketing strategy where other OEM’s should focus on.

Whether it’s an individual or an organization, there is a lot of buzz in Smart phones.  iPhone has created a revolution in the market and now Google’s intervention into the segment with Mobile OS.

The possibility look at all the three phones BlackBerry, iPhone, Android, gives us a sense that it is not going to be easy one for Apple and BlackBerry where their presence is limited to only the phones they manufacture, compared to Google’s Android, where there are nearly 18 manufacturers of the handsets. The moral of the story is that it’s not enough to have a single model  phone to rule the market but probably Apple and BlackBerry can look at different initiatives to expand their market presence by collaborating with other manufacturers.

This argument I would definitely support with  Gartner’s latest report headed by the title “Android to grab No. 2 spot by 2012, says Gartner”. I have read it in Computerworld magazine.The below article is courtesy of Computerworld magazine.

“While the Google-backed Android mobile operating system currently runs on less than 2% of all smartphones, Gartner Inc. predicts it will surge to 14% of the global smartphone market in 2012 — ahead of the iPhone, as well as Windows Mobile and BlackBerry smartphones.

In that year, Gartner forecasts Android will actually rank second globally, behind the Symbian OS, which is used in Nokia devices that are highly popular in Europe and many countries outside the U.S. Symbian now runs on about half of all smartphones, but will fall to 39% in 2012, Gartner says.

The Gartner forecast gives Android such an enormous surge in popularity because of a variety of factors, but chiefly because of Google Inc.’s backing of Android and the range of cloud computing functions and related applications that Google will make available in coming years, Ken Dulaney said in an exclusive interview with Computerworld. And because Android and Google operate in an “integrative and open environment, [they] could easily top … the singular Apple,” he said.

The complete Gartner forecast for smartphone OSes by the end of 2012 puts Symbian on top with 203 million devices sold, and 39% of the market. Android will be second with nearly 76 million units sold, and 14.5% of the market.

Coming in a close third, the iPhone will ship on 71.5 million devices in 2012, giving a 13.7% market share. Windows Mobile will finish fourth, with 66.8 million units sold, or 12.8% of the market.

Very close behind Windows Mobile, the BlackBerry OS will sell on 65.25 million devices in 2012, Gartner forecasts, making it fifth with 12.5% market share.

Android will have moved up the most from 2009 to 2012, from sixth place to second. BlackBerry will have moved down the most, from second to fifth, while iPhone will remain in third position and Windows Mobile will remain in fourth position, Gartner says.”

I still don’t know perfectly how Gartner does future predictions like Astrologers but I strongly support them because I find a strong logic behind their research.

Smart Phone Apps

Thanks to Apple, Google, and BlackBerry. Whatever competition does we don’t mind but we ourselves equip in providing the latest apps on all platforms.  Probably these guys have now created an economy that may be named as “App Economy” which never existed before.

Organizations are looking at Smart Phone Apps as a great movement and Ad agencies are rejoicing the power of new medium for elevating the Brand experience for their customers in a very personalized way. Every one wants to put their strengths in smart phone apps to showcase their creativity and to help their customers in building much more loyal brands.

Still, I understand one thing, probably after Recession, it’s not only customer satisfaction but customer loyalty has also become a very high priority for all the organizations. The Marketing and Branding heads are breaking their heads to use this new medium.  Some use apps for brand elevation and some use it for mobilizing their Enterprise Applications.

What I could suggest is whether you are looking at any of these apps, we need to prioritize, the usage of our customers. We need to look at the ratio of Android, iPhone, and BlackBerry among our customer’s community and then work on building apps.

Why Smart Phone Apps ?

There has been a huge buzz about using latest technologies for marketing. It was facebook, twitter and now the latest is  Smart Phone. Smart Phones are very handy compared to other technologies and they provide the following benefits with a a very personalized and targeted approach to your customers

• Brand Elevation
• Improves Customer loyalty
• Easy way to promote your promotional offers faster
• On the go mobility to reserve or book
• Improves Customer Satisfaction
• Improves Revenue at low TCO
• Real time data for Customers about the latest happenings

Cnet reports that the number of users who will tap into the App store will be at 100 million by 2013. Just imagine the momentum and let’s grab the opportunity with a well build good looking app that helps in your Brand Elevation.

Why TechJini ?

Whether you need to build only an iPhone App or a BlackBerry or Android App,  TechJini helps you in evaluating your customer base first.

• Global Consulting Company
• Innovation in every aspect of Application Development Life cycle
• More than 25 iPhone Apps in the Apple App Store
• Focused and personalized approach towards each Client
• Experience in working with Mobile OEM’s and Fortune 500 companies
• Quality Process with Zero defect delivery
• Flexible Engagement Models
• 100% Delighted Customers
• More than 60% of annual revenues from repeated business
• More than 100% growth YoY

Contact us for a World class  Smart Phone App and get your idea conceptualized and take a perfect shape in TechJini. Just Email us always zameer@techjini.com