All Articles Tagged market share

Could Apple’s iPhone be destined for 3rd place in smartphone marketshare by 2012, trailing Nokia/Symbian’s 39% and Google Android’s 14.5% with a paltry 13.7%? That’s what some analysts at Gartner are telling ComputerWorld, with Nokia already in the global lead, and Google’s wallet, cloud-services, rapid iteration of the OS, and variety of form-factors and UIs from multiple manufacturers. Rounding out the other players are Windows Mobile with 12.8%, RIM BlackBerry with 12.5%, various Linux mobiles with a collective 5.4%, and Palm webOS with 2.1%.

iPhone, projected at 71.5 million unites sold, doesn’t have Nokia’s existing footprint or Google’s services, but here’s the thing: a) it has Apple’s still-unmatched 360 degrees of ecosystem integration, b) will likely continue to improve at the same rate it has since the original iPhone 2G running 1.x with no apps or services in 2007, and c) will remain wildly profitable, and that profit share will remain more important to Apple than raw marketshare.

TiPb has discussed this before, of course. Back in August we heard that while the iPhone currently only has 8% of the market, it gets 32% of the revenue. Further back in January, we heard Apple was making double the profits of Nokia.

So, okay, if the Mayans are wrong and we’re all still here in 2012, maybe Apple will only be making 30% margin on a 13.7% share. But that might still be killer compared to very little on a 39% share.

Just compare Apple’s current financial results to the rest of the industry for an indication of how that works…

Yeah, so if the analysts are to be believed — and Hollywood is wrong about the world ending first – - Apple might just sell 82+ million iPhones in 2012 (not by 2012, but 82+ million that year alone!) accounting for 5.7% of the market.

RBC guestimates that Apple will dominate the media-centric category of smartphones, much as RIM will dominate productivity, leaving Palm and perhaps others to fill out 2-3 additional categories like personal information management, cloud-focused, etc.

The growth in smartphones is expected to come not only at the expense of feature phones, but of PC-class devices as well (fulfilling the so-called Post-PC prophecy).

Personally, we’re waiting for Apple to make an iPhone with the compute power of a MacBook Air that I can just dock into a MacBook shell when I need to do more serious work. Cloud storage, mobile compute power, dockable productivity. That’s the future we’d like…

[via MacRumors]

According to NPD, Apple’s iTunes now sells 25% of all music in the US. That’s up from 21% last year, and 14% the year before. Zoom. Zoom. Walmart, by contrast, is at 14% combining their real-world stores and online distribution.

In the strictly digital domain — which continues to gain share — iTunes accounts for 69% of downloadable music, with Amazon trailing at 8%.

Those numbers, in case they don’t smack anyone immediately in the face, are HUGE. Despite the jump to $1.29 for – quote unquote – premium music, the shift to DRM-free, combined with on-device downloads for the iPhone and iPod touch, might just be enough to keep the juggernaut rolling. Next up, we’ll see how Digital-45s and “cocktail” do for them…

[Marketwatch via iLounge]

The research firm Gartner reports that, for the second quarter of 2009, the iPhone continues to increase its market share on a world-wide level. In fact, it leads the way with the highest increase of market share, as sales increased by 10.5% from one year ago.

This increase of market share can be accounted for due to a few separate reasons. For starters, the early June price drop of the iPhone 3G to $99 was clearly a great way to move inventory while boosting sales. Apple’s product release timing is also plays a large role in their success. While releasing iPhone 3GS to the market at the very end of the second quarter of 2009 all of the initial sales were included in this report.

Everyone knows the iPhone took mind share early on, and there’s little doubt left they own profit share as well. It will be interesting to see where market share ultimately ends up…

[via MacRumors]

While I still firmly believe Apple’s primary currency is mindshare and their primary concern is profit share, analysts fill their plates with metrics and so it’s dinner time once again for smartphone marketshare reports!

And how is Apple doing? Up from 5.3 to 10.8 according to Gartner, while the smartphone market as a whole was up 12.7%.

Of course, when you don’t sell below-cost, margin eating goods, high market share goes hand in hand with high profit share, so Apple is no doubt enjoying both at the moment.

Other big winners included RIM’s BlackBerry, up from 13.3% to 19.9%. Falling in share were Nokia, down from 45.1% to 41.2% and “others” dropping from 28.1% to 18.8% (we have to figure Palm is hidden in there somewhere, and will no doubt rebound when the Pre hits the market starting June 8).

[via Apple Insider]

Quarterly results time, when the internet’s fancy turns to chicken-little predictions of how many percentage points this or that company slipped on which or what index of… who cares.

It’s not the first time we’ve mentioned this, and we’re certainly not the first people to have mentioned it. Yet, just like clockwork every 3 months analysts spout estimates and every blog and their commenters race to re-publish what in essence are meaningless numbers.

Cases in point: Apple and the iPhone.

Certainly, without much room for doubt or question, Apple’s market share and likely iPhone market share will be down this quarter. Newsflash: the market will likely be down this quarter. So if Apple is selling 1% or 2% less in terms of units, hellseven 10% less in terms of units, is that reason to panic?

If you’re an analyst or shockmedia type, likely “yes”, or if you’re manipulating stock for short term turnover rather than stable long term growth, “aye, ye scurvy dogs!”. But if you’re Apple?

No.

Historically, Apple doesn’t care about market share, they care about profit share. (They already own mind share, so we’ll remove that from the equation for now).

Apple is a public company that reports its margins, which typically run around 30%. Let that sink in for a moment. When Palm is selling millions of Centros and losing money hand over fist, when Nokia owns the international market and revenues plummet, when PC makers are racing each other to the bottom of the netbook price list to eek out razor-thin margins and gaining footprint only to hemorrhage cash, rumors of iPhone nanos and cheapo iNetbooks make as little sense for Apple as iSupply- and analyst-fueled headlines.

Sure, it’s nice for consumers to get low prices, but not at the expense of the companies going out of business and no longer giving us products or competition. Short term gain at long term loss isn’t sustainable. It’s the $0.99 fart app of the electronics space.

Apple reports earnings on April 22nd.

As part of the iPhone 3.0 Preview Event today, Apple announced that their iPhone OS, which powers both the iPhone and the iPod touch, is now on 30 million devices — including 17 million iPhones (presumable 2G and 3G) by December, 2008. And while we’re admittedly mathlexic around here, but that sounds like the first admission of iPod touch sales to us, which would peg them at 13 million?

Along with previous stats that have been guestimated (like 25,000 apps in the App Store), Apple also announced over 800 million app downloads (!!) to date, and 800,000 iPhone SDK downloads as well.

Staggering. Numbers. Indeed.

TiPb. Heart. Steve. Ballmer. Microsoft’s #2 has really become #1 in our CEOh-Snap department. See, he doesn’t just hit the mic, he pummels it to bloody, infuriating, borderline committable pulp. This time, however, D|All Things Digital brings us a little CEOh-Snap back in the form of Ballmer being on the receiving end for once, via an unhappy questioner at the CIO Summit:

“With platforms like the Google phone and iPhone coming out, it’s really tough to continue to stand behind Windows Mobile when our employees are bringing these consumer devices into our environments,” the questioner explained. “And in your presentation you put Windows Mobile right in the center there, but it was a phone that doesn’t work in America and an operating system that you haven’t released. I’m wondering what your commitment is to continuing to get newer versions of the operating system in our hands so that we don’t have to fight this battle on the ground.”

Ballmer’s come back? WinPho 6.5 this year is significant but not everything they want for higher-end phones; that’ll come next year(!) with WinPho 7. Microsoft is accelerating their efforts, and people still bought more Windows Mobile devices than iPhone last year anyway, so: nyah!

(Though we’d remind Mr. Ballmer that Apple’s international roll-out really only began in July 2008, more than half-way through the year, and he’s welcome to check the sales numbers for Q3 2008 to see how that worked out for everyone…)

According to Admob (via TUAW), Apple’s share of the mobile Web is big and might just be getting bigger:

Worldwide requests from Apple devices grew 28% month over month to 1.2 billion in January. Building on its strong December, iPod Touch growth outpaced iPhone growth in top markets. The iPod Touch now represents 40% of Apple requests, up from 20% in September.

People like great mobile browsers that can handle HTML, CSS, and AJAX, who’d have thunk it?

Of course, competing devices from Nokia, Palm, and Google, are beginning to use Apple’s WebKit in browsers of their own, Firefox keeps threatening to push their mobile Fennec client to release status, and RIM is inching the Bold towards usability, so can Apple and the iPhone/Safari team maintain their leading edge?

During Apple’s last conference call, Steve Jobs positively cooed about Apple’s iPhone passing RIM’s Blackberry in sales last month. If anyone had any doubts, Canalys says it’s so (for whatever that bag of analysis is worth). According to Apple Insider, they pegged the market as Nokia 46.6%, Apple 17.3, RIM 15.2, and Windows Mobile 13.6. (Google’s Android, of course, was not yet launched and Palm… er… Palm?)

While some have cited Bold delays, Storm warnings, an iPhone 3G honeymoon, and other reasons to explain Apple’s good fortunes last quarter, JD Powers 2008 Business Wireless Smartphone Customer Satisfaction Study gives an even more interesting answer: Business users like the iPhone better!

Blackberrys are okay, and Palms are teh sux, by contrast, according to the survey. The iPhone’s edge? ease of use, feature set and design. Engadget points out that the iPhone scored 5/5 on features, in spite of our ongoing complaints about the lack of cut and paste, A2DP, MMS, etc., etc. ad naseum infinitum.

ahem

So maybe, just maybe, users prefer a smaller set of features done delightfully well to a gobsmack of them cobbled together with near impenetrability?

Who’da thunk it?