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 (Reuters) - Apple, which became the world's largest smartphone vendor in the fourth quarter, will see its iPhone market share slipping for a couple of quarters as the novelty of its latest 4S model runs out, research firm Gartner said on Wednesday.
Reuters: Internet News »
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Mobile phone shipments on a global basis reached 427.4 million units in the fourth quarter of 2011 -- a tepid 6.1 percent rise from the year earlier period, IDC says.
The global handset market's single-digit growth in the seasonally strong fourth quarter shows that handset vendors are not immune to weaker macroeconomic conditions worldwide, the firm's analysts said Thursday.
A surge in smartphone purchases led by Apple's iPhone 4S in the final three months of 2011 also caused feature phone shipments to decline faster than analysts had expected. Smartphone growth in Western Europe was not enough to offset the feature phones decline, despite successful product performances from Apple and Samsung.
With the exception of Apple, feature phones still account for a majority of unit sales at four of the five top handset vendors, said IDC Research Analyst Kevin Restivo.
"The introduction of high-growth products such as the iPhone 4S, which shipped in the fourth quarter, bolstered smartphone growth," Restivo said. "Yet overall market growth fell to its lowest point since the third quarter of 2009 -- when the global economic recession was in full bloom."
Strong iPhone Customer Loyalty
Unit shipments of Apple's red-hot iPhone 4S reached a record 37 million units in the fourth quarter of 2011, which propelled the company into the No. 3 slot in the global handset market overall. During last year as a whole, Apple shipped 93.2 million iPhones.
According to Strategy Analytics, Apple is on track to ship well more than 100 million iPhones during 2012.
"China is becoming a key market for Apple this year, and we expect Apple's share to grow rapidly in 2012, despite countless copycat rivals," said Strategy Analytics Director Tom Kang.
Investment firm Piper Jaffray expects Apple to ship 134 million iPhone units during calendar year 2012.
"Despite the lack of... newsfactor.com » | Apple's share of the U.S. smartphone market has risen dramatically in the wake of Apple's October launch of the iPhone 4S -- and with the mobile OS system gap between Apple's iOS and Google Android narrowing sharply in December, according to a new U.S. mobile user survey released by Nielsen on Wednesday.
Android's mobile OS market share fell from 61.6 percent in October to 46.9 percent in December, Nielsen said. By contrast, Apple's iOS market share climbed from 25.1 percent to 44.5 percent during the same period.
Piper Jaffray analysts Gene Munster and Andrew Murphy now believe that Apple's fourth-quarter iPhone sales were stronger than the investment firm had previously projected.
"Our previous estimate of 30 million could prove to be conservative," Munster and Murphy wrote in a Tuesday investor note. "We are raising our estimate by 600,000 units to 30.6 million."
Commanding a Premium Price
About 46 percent of U.S. mobile consumers overall owned smartphones during the final quarter of 2011, according to Nielsen. Furthermore, 60 percent of the survey respondents who acquired a new mobile device within the last three months said they elected to choose a smartphone over a feature phone.
Among smartphone users overall, Nielsen reports that consumer adoption of Android models continued to lead the field in December with a 46.3 percent share of its survey respondents. Still, the iPhone's 88 percent year-over-year unit shipment growth and average selling price, or ASP, of $640, according to Piper Jaffray, demonstrate that plenty of consumers were willing to pay a hefty premium for Apple's red hot device during last year's fourth quarter.
Much the same trend is playing out in other regional markets around the world, including Europe. "The iPhone 4S is the most expensive," confirmed Francisco Jeronimo, a research manager at IDC.
Samsung's Galaxy Note comes closest to matching the... newsfactor.com » | TAIPEI/HONG KONG (Reuters) - Apple Inc will release a cheaper iPhone 4 within weeks, jeopardizing profit margins to win lower-end customers from rivals such as Nokia in China and other emerging markets.
Reuters: Internet News » | The NPD Group reported Thursday that for the first time ever, more than half the handsets that U.S. consumers purchased were smartphones -- with first-quarter sales up eight percent from the prior quarter. Samsung led the U.S. cell-phone market overall with a 23 percent share, followed by LG Electronics at 18 percent, the research firm added.
Still, Apple's iPhone accounted for 14 percent of the U.S. mobile-phone market, besting major smartphone rivals HTC, Motorola and Research In Motion. According to NPD Executive Director Ross Rubin, brisk first-quarter iPhone sales were driven by pent-up demand for Apple's iconic device from Verizon Wireless subscribers.
"Apple and Verizon had a very successful launch of the iPhone 4, which allowed the iPhone to expand its market share that was previously held back by its prolonged carrier exclusivity with AT&T," Rubin said. "While some of that growth came at the expense of [Google's] Android operating system, Android models still accounted for half of all smartphones sold in the quarter."
Android Slips
According to NPD's new survey of U.S. consumers ages 18 and older, Android-based smartphone sales in the U.S. declined three percentage points in comparison with the prior quarter, but still amassed a 50 percent market share. Research In Motion's BlackBerry sales fell five percentage points on a sequential basis to a 14 percent market share.
By contrast, Apple's iPhone sales rose nine percentage points to a 28 percent share of smartphone sales in the U.S. Verizon's CDMA iPhone launch in February further solidified Apple's position as the top-selling mobile phone in the U.S. Moreover, NPD said Apple's iPhone 3GS -- courtesy of a steep price discount at AT&T -- came in second, followed by the Motorola Droid X.
"The rise of Apple and HTC show how companies can drive change in a mature device market to... newsfactor.com » |
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