Growth in the Smartphone Market Under Pressure

The global smartphone market grew strongly in 2008, but that growth was showing signs of slowing by the end of the year. Several device makers enjoyed strong growth, but much of this came at the expense of Nokia.

Sales of smartphones worldwide in 2008 totaled 139.3 million devices, up 13.9% over 2007, according to market-research firm Gartner. But by the fourth quarter of the year, the growth was less strong. In the Oct-Dec period, 38.1 million units were sold, an increase of just 3.7% over the fourth quarter of 2007.

“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,“ said Roberta Cozza, research director at Gartner.

On a regional basis, smartphone sales in N. America grew 69% in 2008. Growth in other areas was much slower: they were up just 2% in the EMEA region in Q4, and up 2.3% in the Asia/Pacific region.

Smartphones made up 12% of all mobile device sales in the fourth quarter of 2008, roughly equal to the same period of 2007, when they were 11% of the phone market. In N. America, smartphones accounted for roughly 20% of sales, a dramatic increase over the past year.

Apple and RIM Up, Nokia Down
Nokia held onto its place as the top smartphone maker in the fourth quarter of last year with 40.8% of the global market, but its smartphone sales declined by 16.8% year-on-year. For all of 2008, it grew just 0.8%.

RIM, maker of the BlackBerry line, was in second place in the fourth quarter with 19.5%, and its sales grew sharply: up 84.9% year-over-year. It's growth for the whole year was even stronger, up 96.7%.

Apple more than doubled its sales in the last quarter of 2008, up 111.6%. That was enough to push to to 8.2% of the world smartphone market. While this company showed strong annual growth in 2008, the iPhone debuted halfway through 2007, so results are a bit skewed.

In fourth place was HTC with 4.2% of the global market in Q4, up 58% year-over-year. However, this includes only the company's own-branded devices. The devices that HTC designs for wireless carriers -- such as the AT&T Fuze -- are listed by Gartner with the wireless carrier's results.

Nokia's Problems Mean Problems for Symbian S60
Nokia is by far the largest maker of phones running Symbian S60, so it's no surprise that sales of Symbian devices were off last quarter, down 21.6%. Still, 47.1% of all smartphones sold during that period were Symbian-based.

It should also come as no surprise that BlackBerry and iPhone/Mac OS X Mobile sales were up strongly, as these devices are made exclusively by RIM and Apple. In second place in the operating system market was BlackBerry with 19.5% of the world market, and the iPhone was in fourth place with a 10.7% share.

Microsoft's Windows Mobile, which is used by a wide variety of companies, was in third place with 12.4% of the global market in Q4. It grew 7.8% year-over-year, and enjoyed a 16% growth over the previous quarter. According to Gartner, this was mainly driven by the popularity of the Samsung Omnia and touchscreen models from HTC.

In fifth place was the collection of generic Linux version popular in Asia, and in sixth was the Palm OS with 0.9% of the world market last quarter. That was down 27.3% year-over-year.

Source: Gartner