Quietly taking over
Market researcher comScore has published its latest report into the smartphone market in Europe's five biggest economies - France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK - and they reveal the nature of the shifts among the major platform providers.
As you can see in the table below, Nokia's Symbian is losing market share hand over fist, which by itself is no great surprise. But it looks like pretty much all former Symbian customers are moving over to Android, maybe implying an aversion to the iPhone among Nokia users. This has led to Android overtaking iOS to take second place behind Symbian in these countries.
If anything, Symbian still has a surprisingly high market share, and that 38 percent figure runs contrary to a recent IDC report that had Nokia's Western European market share at a mere 11 percent in the equivalent period.
Top Smartphone Platforms in EU5 by Share of Smartphone Users* |
|||
Smartphone Platform |
Share (%) of EU5 Smartphone Users |
||
Jul-10 |
Jul-11 |
Point Change |
|
Total Smartphone Users |
100.00% |
100.0% |
0.0 |
Symbian |
53.9% |
37.8% |
-16.1 |
|
6.0% |
22.3% |
16.2 |
Apple |
19.0% |
20.3% |
1.2 |
RIM |
8.0% |
9.4% |
1.5 |
Microsoft |
11.5% |
6.7% |
-4.8 |
*MobiLens measures users above the age of 13 and reports on only primary handset usage.
"Smartphone adoption has seen significant growth from the previous year, driven in large part by the increasing popularity of the Google Android platform," said Jeremy Copp, comScore Europe VP for mobile. "Although Symbian continues to lead the EU5 smartphone market, Android is gaining fast and recently passed Apple to become the second most popular platform."
The Android OEM data is especially interesting, since it breaks them down by country. As you can see HTC is having a stormer in the UK with half of the total Android market .
Top Mobile OEMs for the Google Android Platform in EU5 |
||||||
OEM |
Share (%) of Google Android Smartphone Users |
|||||
EU5 |
UK |
France |
Germany |
Italy |
Spain |
|
Total Google Android Smartphone Users |
100.0% |
100.0% |
100.0% |
100.0% |
100.0% |
100.0% |
HTC |
34.6% |
50.9% |
21.8% |
29.8% |
24.8% |
31.9% |
Samsung |
31.7% |
21.6% |
42.3% |
32.4% |
35.6% |
33.9% |
Sony Ericsson |
15.1% |
14.2% |
17.4% |
14.6% |
8.3% |
18.8% |
LG |
5.8% |
3.5% |
7.8% |
6.8% |
10.1% |
3.4% |
Motorola |
3.6% |
2.1% |
3.0% |
7.8% |
2.4% |
2.8% |