Both IDC and Strategy Analytics have just published their quarter 2 estimates for worldwide smartphone shipments by vendor. Whereas it was pretty close just a couple of quarters ago with Apple it’s another convincing win for Samsung this time with a 16% lead in market share terms.
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Both press releases (Strategy Analytics & IDC ), and a significant number of commentators, have majored on the “Apple & Samsung have more than 50% of the market” angle.
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An interesting point that we noticed was that in the context of the overall mobile market a comparison of the smartphone growth in total and by vendor is fascinating.
| Total Mobile & Smartphone Vendor Shipments Q2 2012 | ||||||
| Q2 2012 | Q2 2012 | Q2 2012 | Q2 2011 | Q2 2011 | Q2 2011 | |
| Units mln | Units mln | % Smart- | Units mln | Units mln | % Smart- | |
| Mobile | Smartphone | -phone | Mobile | Smartphone | -phone | |
| Apple | 26.0 | 26.0 | 100.0% | 20.4 | 20.4 | 100.0% |
| Samsung | 97.8 | 50.2 | 51.3% | 75.4 | 20.2 | 26.8% |
| Nokia | 83.7 | 10.2 | 12.2% | 88.5 | 16.7 | 18.9% |
| Other | 198.5 | 67.5 | 34.0% | 217.5 | 51.0 | 23.4% |
| Total | 406.0 | 153.9 | 37.9% | 401.8 | 108.3 | 27.0% |
| Source data: IDC Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker, July 26, 2012 | ||||||
| Source calculations: I.co.uk | ||||||
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So using IDC’s data the total proportion of smartphones shipped in a year has moved up from 27% to 38% and Samsung has accounted for over 60% of the growth .
At the Global Investment Conference yesterday at Lancaster House we think it was Eric Schmidt who said (in so many words) that the world population was 7bn and that there were 5bn mobile phones out there of which 1bn are smartphones, The implication being that there would be a huge move to smartphones in the foreseeable future. So the conclusion was “that’s quite a market …”. We certainly could not disagree!
