Cellphone market falls 9% in Q1
May
22,
2012
Worldwide sales of mobile phones (budget, midrange, feature and smartphones) to end users reached 379m units in Q1 2012 - a 9% decline from Q1 2011, says Forward Concepts in its new study of the market called Cellular Handset & Tablet Chip Markets '12.
Sales of smartphones continued to drive mobile device market growth, reaching 139m units in Q1 2012, reaching 37% of the global cellphone market.
Smartphone vendors, Apple and Samsung, raised their combined share to 45.7%, up from 30% in Q1 2011, and widening their lead over Nokia – which saw its smartphone market share drop to 8.6%.
In Q1 2012, Apple iPads achieved a 59.3 % share of the media tablet market (which includes the sub-$199 Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook).
Apple’s multimode LTE "iPAD3" has positioned the company to offer the iPAD2 at lower prices, causing a decline in Android tablet shipments.
E-reader manufacturers shipped just 1.4m units in Q1 2012, down from 4.2m units in Q4 2011.
"Global sales of mobile devices declined in Q1 more than expected due to a slowdown in demand from the emerging regions,” says the principal author, Carter L. Horney, “all vendors were impacted at different levels; however, Chinese white-box vendors suffered the most with bloated inventories.”
Details of the new report are at www.fwdconcepts.com/Cellchip12