Almost half a billion smartphones were sold worldwide last year, and about a third of those were sold in the fourth quarter. Analysts agree that by the fourth quarter, Apple was at the top of the smartphone market with its record 37 million iPhones shipped. There is less agreement on who won the smartphone race for the full year. Samsung does not publish exact smartphone sales figures, but analyst Tomi Ahonen, recently rated the top social media influencer in the mobile space, has averaged estimates from Gartner, IDC, Canalys, IDC to come up with an estimate of 90.9 million smartphones sold by Samsung last year, putting Samsung in second place to Apple’s 93.1 million.
Just one year earlier, Nokia beat all these numbers with 100 million smartphone sales. In 2011, “we witnessed a world record in market share destruction,” says Ahonen, who was a Nokia executive at one time. But other market watchers think it is too soon to draft an obituary for the Finnish giant, which still sells more mobile phones overall than any other company. Nokia’s new line of Lumia Windows-based phones are attracting feature phone owners who are upgrading to smartphones. “It is a good gateway into the Nokia-Windows ecosystem,” says John Feland, whose Argus Insights analyzes consumer research from carriers and retailers to find out how people respond to products. “Nokia is hitting the market with what they’re trying to do. The real question is, for people whose first smartphone is a Lumia, will it be their next one?”
Feland is less optimistic about the prospects for Research in Motion, another casualty of the huge success enjoyed by Apple and Samsung. “RIM has just cratered,” he says. “BlackBerry is one of the lowest ranked, and continues to disappoint consumers.” Of course RIM’s relationships with enterprise clients have always been its core strength, but Feland says even these are giving way to consumer preferences. “When the CEO walks in with an iPhone and tells IT ‘make it work’ (for the company), that’s a lot different from IT saying ‘You are all getting BlackBerries,” says Feland. He says RIM’s legacy relationship with enterprise clients give them “a seat at the table,” but that access may be short-lived if the company cannot attract app developers to its operating system, and adopt a more customer-centered point of view.
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