According to Nielson ratings Apple is still the number one handset in the United States, but HTC is not all that far behind. According to a recent study, which took all the handsets bought over a three month period ending October 2011, 21 percent of the handsets were HTC models. That is second to Apple which had almost 30 percent in the study. That says a lot of HTC, which is based out of Taiwan. In the third quarter of 2011, HTC was also the largest vendor of Android and Windows powered phones in the United States, coming out ahead of Samsung and Motorola.
Other companies that were in the study include Blackberry, which had 17 percent of the market share, Samsung and Motorola who both had 11 percent of the market share. The information could be tied almost directly to the number of shipped units from each company. In the third quarter, HTC shipped about 5.7 million handsets in the United States and that was more than Apple or Samsung. That number also gave HTC about 25 percent of the overall market share in the United States. Samsung had the second most shipments with 4.9 million in the same time period and Apple can in third with 4.6 million handsets shipped. Apple likely got a big boost from the new iPhone 4S that launched in October.
HTC has been on the fast track for 2011 and has come out on top of other market surveys, but Morgan Stanley advises that the company will be losing market share due to high competition and a fast changing smartphone market. In the United States HTC has competition from other Android powered handsets. Mainly from Samsung on the higher end and other Chinese made handsets that are coming on the more affordable lower end. As soon as the Apple iPhone 4S is available in more countries, like China, HTC market share will likely drop again.
Morgan Stanley ran their own market research and the investment bank said in a recent study over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, users that were in the market for a new smartphone; only 8 percent of them said they would buy an HTC device. The survey did not go into other handsets consumers would buy if they were not buying an HTC.
