Both Samsung Electronics Co and Apple have overtaken Nokia in terms of the total number of shipments during the last quarter, as a lesser number of units based on the aging Symbian platform were sold by the Finnish cell phone giant. In the quarter which ended this June, Apple comprised 18.5% of the smartphone shipments all over the world as compared to the 13.5% it shipped last year, according to Strategy Analytics.
Nokia has fallen to 15.2% from the 38.1% shipments it made last year, said analysts. Nokia still is the largest worldwide producer of handsets, even as its share of the market has gone down to its lowest level in twelve years. The stock has also fallen by 47% during this year, which says a lot about the difficulties Nokia faces while competing against rivals such as Apple and Google with products such as the iPhone and handsets based on the Android platform. Apple has posted a record profit for last quarter and said that its share went up by 21%.
KBC Asset Management’s Leon Cappaert said that market shares have been shifting since the iPhone was introduced and Nokia has not yet found an answer to it. The company added that it seems that the availability of components is increasing and the iPad and iPhone are expected to have a good second half. The last quarter saw worldwide shipments of handsets grow by 13% to reach 361 million units, the main cause of which was a growth of 76% in smartphone sales. A total of 110 million smartphone units were sold last year. The share of Nokia in the worldwide smartphone market has fallen down to 24.5% from the 34.7% share it enjoyed last year.
Neil Mawston, an analyst from London, said that Samsung is not much below Nokia as the performance of the Symbian based phones and lack of a good portfolio of touchscreen phones has weighed down the performance of the Finnish company. Samsung, too, has fallen by 11% this year even as it beat the estimates of analysts when reporting the profits for second quarter. The sales of the iPhone have, on the other hand, gone up to 20.3 million units during the last quarter as overseas demand has started picking up significantly, according to Apple. The iPhone made up 46.4% of Apple’s revenue this year.
