Summary
While overall sales of mobile phones declined during 1H09, sales of Smartphones increased 27% during 2Q09. This increase is expected to continue through the remainder of 2009 and into 2010. Within the past year, the astounding growth in the Smartphone area has come from Apple's iPhone. In 2Q08, iPhone held only a 2.8% share of the Smartphone market. In 2Q09, Apple held 13.8%*.
Analysis
Many US carriers are readying for a strong second half by beefing up Smartphone offerings. My prediction is that in the not-too-distant future, the vanilla, "voice-only" handset will be history. Emerging will be two segments in the Smartphone marketplace:
- Low-end Smartphones - consumer/youth target
- High-end Smartphones - enterprise/pro user targets
Apple's strong performance to date with the iPhone has them well poised to continue growing market share, especially as the iPhone is now a strong performer in the Enterprise segment. Among handset manufacturers, my bet is on one of the Asian manufacturers. Many of the Asian manufacturers are positioned to tackle both low and high-end segments of the Smartphone market.
Lynne Gregg consults with leading institutions through GLG
Analyses are solely the work of the authors and have not been edited or endorsed by GLG.
