Global Smartphone Sales 47% Growth in Q4 of 2011 – Gartner Report

The analysts over Gartner have just published their annual report on smartphone sales in fourth quarter of 2011. It’s not surprising that, 2011 was been the year for smartphone, where almost every third mobile device sold was a smartphone. Gartner is also expected that this statistic will rise to 39% in 2012. According to source, global smartphone sales to end users climbed to 149 million units in the fourth quarter of 2011, it’s a 47.3% increase from the Q4 of 2010. While total smartphone sales in 2011 scrambled 472 million units, it’s raise to 58 percent from 2010.

Roberta Cozza, principal research analyst at Gartner said that, “Western Europe and North America led most of the smartphone growth for Apple during the fourth quarter of 2011.” “In Western Europe the spike in iPhone sales in the fourth quarter saved the overall smartphone market after two consecutive quarters of slow sales.”

Apple is at 3rd position in the list but with a increased market share of 5%, while Nokia is on the top of the list but lost almost 5 points from the previous year. 2012 will be a key year in determining whether the Finnish giant can manage itself to make profit with its Windows Phone devices. Recently we got a couple of Lumia series smartphone; Lumia 710 and Lumia 800 but these are not enough to compete in a tough market. We also have to remember that WP market share get 65% decline as compared to 2010.

Not surprisingly Samsung had a solid year in 2011 with huge units of sale, and control virtually the same 17% market share as 2010. 2011 was not a bad year at all for the Taiwanese tech giant, HTC. It’s increased its market share from 1.5% to 2.3%. Interestingly ZTE and Huawei were two of fastest growing manufacturers in 2011, they now covering almost 6% of the global market.

But the year 2011 was disappointed for the brands like RIM, LG and Sony Ericsson (now only Sony). Even RIM’s struggles are expected to continue in 2012, due to lack of a developer database and delay of BlackBerry 10. But Sony and LG are hopping better result in 2012 with their flagship products; Xperia S and Optimus 3D 2.

Annette Zimmermann, principal research analyst at Gartner said that, “Expectations for 2012 are for the overall market to grow by about 7 percent, while smartphone growth is expected to slow to around 39 percent”.

According to Ms. Cozza, “Samsung closed the gap with Nokia in overall market share.” “Samsung profited from strong smartphone sales of 34 million units in the fourth quarter of 2011. The troubled economic environment in Europe and Nokia’s weakened brand status posed challenges that were hard to overcome in just one quarter. However, Nokia proved its ability to execute and deliver on time with its new Lumia 710 and 800 handsets. Nokia will have to continue to offer aggressive prices to encourage communications service providers (CSPs) to add its products to portfolios currently dominated by Android-based devices.”

When we will talk about the mobile operating system, we blindly find Android on the top of the list and it’s also happened in this time. Android now covers over half of the smartphone market with 50.9% market share, while Apple is climbed up 8 points from 2010 to 23.8%. It’s a real disappointment for Symbian that it lost a huge amount of market share as you can see in the table 3. All other mobile platforms are losing their market share except Bada with a little increase. Well hit the break to checkout the tables for a brief and details information.

Table 1:

Global Mobile Device Sales to End Users by Vendor in 4Q11 (Thousands of Units)

Table 2:

Global Mobile Device Sales to End Users by Vendor in 2011 (Thousands of Units)

Table 3:

Global Smartphone Sales to End Users by OS in Q4 2011 (Thousands of Units)

Source: Gartner (February 2012)