The second quarter smartphone results for some mobile manufacturers are in. The patterns are staying true to predictions with a few breaking the mold. Apple has always had a predictable look to their sales results, thanks to their way of offering just one smartphone. Looking at their sales graph produces a predictable three quarters of low sales with a huge increase around June. A small bump in sales occurs around Christmas. But this year is awry. Apple has traditionally offered their new iPhone around June or July. That did not and is not going to happen this year. For this reason the sales numbers are not in yet on the iPhone. The big news is that they beat out Nokia in sheer numbers of smartphone sales, which reveals copious amounts of information about the results of the mobile war.
Speaking of Nokia, they have had a disastrous quarter. They were boycotted by resellers thanks to their administrative mismanagement. Nokia has lost two thirds of its smartphone base from their February 11 announcement. That is the day that Stephen Elop announced that Nokia was standing on a “burning platform”. The world apparently believed it and is abandoning Nokia. Smartphone sales numbers have not been reported from Nokia for the second quarter, but they can be expected to be a little behind Apple. For overall dumbphone and smartphone sales, expect Nokia to remain number one for a small time.
Samsung has been having some excellent sales numbers, thanks to their popular Galaxy line of smartphones. They also own top spot for overall ( feature phone and smartphone ) sales in North America and Europe. It is predicted that Samsung sold 19 million smartphones for this second quarter. This is a nice jump up from the 12.6 million in the first quarter. With a perfect growth of 20 percent, Samsung would have had 15.1 million smartphone sales. The 19 million number shows they are growing wildly. They will reveal the exact numbers in a couple of weeks.
The rest of the field is managing to stay solvent. Motorola sold 4.1 million smartphones in the last quarter, which was a decline for that company. LG sold a bit more than Motorola and is expected to stay the same. Sony Ericsson sold a little more than LG and posted a profit, but were negatively affected by the record-breaking Japanese earthquake. The earthquake disturbed the supply chain for Sony Ericsson.
There are an expected 450 to 475 million smartphones expected to be sold for this year. That will make sales this year at least 25 percent larger than last year.
