When second quarter stats revealed that mobile handset shipments were down 8% since last year, it raised a slight concern among the telecom crowd. As it turns out, though, this wasn’t such a bad thing after all.
It seems that shipments went down for a time in response to low consumer excitement with mobile products in the post-iPhone era. Now, with new smartphones arriving on the scene and public confidence in the global market on the rise, the numbers are reflecting improvement.
Strategy Analytics’ Q2 2009 Global Handset Market Share Update reported that 273 million handset units shipped in the second quarter. After year-over-year declines of 10.7% in Q4 of 2008 and 13.7% in Q1 of 2009, it seems shipments are slowly on the climb.
Another intelligence firm, the International Data Corp. (IDC),
released similar figures for Q2 handset shipments, for a 10.8%
year-over-year drop. To reiterate, this was an improvement over Q1
2009, which experienced a 17.2% decline from the prior year. An IDC
senior research analyst stated that Apple, in addition to Nokia,
Samsung, and Research in Motion, “all beat expectations” for
smartphones in the second quarter.
Which products are the most compelling? Two years after its initial debut, the iPhone clearly remains one of them. In Q2, Apple shipped 5.2 million units, for a 1.9% market share.
And, it seems that the high demand for GPS only enhances the trend. Strategy Analytics reported that GPS-enabled smartphone shipments are expected to increase by 34% this year, to 77 million units.
It seems that smartphones have not only permanently changed the way we communicate; they have also left their indelible seal on the global communications market.
Mobile phone sales are down. Smartphone sales are rising. Is this
due to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and blogging addiction?
With
250 million users on Facebook, Twitter users growing almost
exponentially, and 1 million blog posts added to the Internet daily, it
begs the question: How much does connecting on Facebook, Twitter, and
other social media mean to us? Does it mean that now we need a
smartphone so we can access our favorites through apps? I believe the
answer is yes. I know it already has for me; and now other signs are
appearing that support the same notion.
Jim Adams - CEO
New Homes Directory .com
www.JimAdams.me
