20100803

The forgotten iPhone sales news

The web is all a flutter with news that Android phone shipments have grown by 886% in the last year.

That isn't entirely surprising given that Android is a relatively new technology, the first Android phone only arrived on the market in September 2008 so its still a very young market.  There are lots of interesting statistics from the Nielson report, including very high brand loyalty figures for Android (71% of people who own an Android phone intend to buy Android again) and iPhone (89% of iPhone owners intend to stick with iPhone), especially compared to the 42% figure for Blackberry users.

There's one statistic that hasn't been widely picked up though; Apple failed to grow iPhone sales as fast the rest of the smartphone market.

The overall smartphone market grew by 63.3% from Q2 2009 to Q2 2010.

Apple's iPhone shipments grew at "only" 61.4%.

To be fair, as you can see from the BBC's table (reproduced below) Apple had the second highest growth in the year at 61.4%, nicely out stripping the established players Symbian and RIM at around 41%.  However, for the first time in quite a while, what must be decades in Internet years, Apple failed to keep up with the market average increase and actually lost market share.  There's no way that Android's growth in shipments or market share can continue at that rate for long but, if Apple want to continue to drive the agenda for smartphones, they'll have to find some way to compete at the lower end of the smartphone market that Android has taken ownership of.



Worldwide smartphone market

OS Q2 2010 shipments % share Q2 2009 shipments % share Growth

Symbian


27,129,340



43.5



19,178,910



50.3



41.5



RIM



11,248,830



18.0



7,975,950



20.9



41



Android



10,689,290



17.1



1,084,240



2.8



885.9



Apple



8,411,910



13.5



5,211,560



13.7



61.4



Microsoft



3,083,060



4.9



3,431,380



9.0



-10.2



Others



1,851,830



3.0



1,244,620



3.3



48.8



Total



62,414,260



100



38,126,660



100


63.3

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