Microsoft overtaken by Bada in smartphone platforms

The rise of the East

The latest Gartner mobile devices market figures reveal a couple of rather humiliating relegations.

Among the major smartphone platforms Microsoft's combined efforts - Windows Mobile and Windows Phone - dropped to sixth place in terms of market share by volume. This humbling is compounded by the fact that the software behemoth which supplanted it was none other than Samsung, via its own low-end smartphone platform - Bada.

The table below shows the respective market shares in Q2, and a year earlier. As you can see Microsoft accounted for more than six times as many sales as Bada a year ago. We can only assume Samsung has focused its Bada efforts on certain countries, possible less developed ones, as its focus seems to be almost entirely Android in Western markets. You have to question Samsung's long-term commitment to WP7, looking at these figures.

Worldwide Smartphone Sales to End Users by Operating System in 2Q11 (Thousands of Units)

Source: Gartner (August 2011)

Further up the table Android's exponential growth is revealed, and it's surely on course to account for over half of the smartphone market by the end of the year. This growth has come mostly at the expense of Symbian, which is to be expected, and BlackBerry, which is alarming for RIM.

Total smartphone  sales of almost 108 million units were up 74 percent on a year ago, and now account for a quarter of all mobile handset sales, up from 17 percent a year ago. Hence, while Apple's iOS only increased its market share by four percentage points, it more than doubled its total sales.

Moving onto to total mobile sales, Nokia is still comfortably number one, but it lost another big chunk of market share. Furthermore Gartner reckons that Q3 stands to be even worse, with sales into the channel low in the past quarter.

"The sales efforts of the channel, combined with Nokia's greater concentration in retail and distributors' sales, saw Nokia destock more than 9 million units overall and 5 million smartphones, helping it hold on to its position as the leading smartphone manufacturer by volume," said Roberta Cozza, principal research analyst at Gartner. "However, we will not see a repeat of this performance in the third quarter of 2011, as Nokia's channel is pretty lean."

Worldwide Mobile Device Sales to End Users by Vendor in 2Q11 (Thousands of Units)

Source: Gartner (August 2011)

Despite selling five million Galaxy S IIs, Samsung still lost a bit of total mobile market share in Q2, as did LG, Motorola and RIM, with the latter suffering the ignominy of losing fifth place to Chinese giant ZTE. HTC did well and is on course to relegate RIM to seventh place in the second quarter, as did Huawei, but Sony Ericsson is now down to tenth.

The ascendancy of the Chinese giants and ‘others' show the twin competitive threats faced by the traditional mobile phone giants. A new breed of manufacturers is able to produce quality feature-phones more cheaply than ever, and have an advantage in the huge Chinese market. Meanwhile Apple continues to go from strength to strength at the top end.