Gartner: Worldwide Mobile Phone Sales Grew 17 Percent in First Quarter 2010

Worldwide mobile phone sales to end users totalled 314.7 million units in the first quarter of 2010, a 17 percent increase from the same period in 2009, according to Gartner Inc. Smarpthone sales to end users reached 54.3 million units, an increase of 48.7 percent from the first quarter of 2009. Among the most successful vendors were those that controlled an integrated set of operating system (OS), hardware and services.

"In the first quarter of 2010, smartphone sales to end users saw their strongest year-on-year increase since 2006," said Carolina Milanesi, Research Vice President at Gartner. "This quarter saw RIM, a pure smartphone player, make its debut in the top five mobile devices manufacturers, and saw Apple increase its market share by 1.2 percentage points. Android’s momentum continued into the first quarter of 2010, particularly in North America, where sales of Android-based phones increased 707 percent year-on-year.

Growth in the mobile devices market was driven by double-digit growth of smartphone sales in mature markets, helped by wider product availability as well as mass market price tags. "Increasing sales of white-box products in some emerging regions, in particular India, also drove sales of mobile phones upward. We expect sales of white-box products to remain very healthy for the remainder of 2010, especially outside of China,” said Milanesi.

The first quarter also saw some movement outside the top five mobile handset vendor rankings, Hong Kong-based manufacturer G-Five made its debut into the top 10, grabbing 1.4 percent of market share in the first quarter of 2010. The rise of white-box manufacturers from Asia has also helped the "others" section, as a proportion of overall sales, increase its market share to 19.20 per cent in the first quarter of 2010, up 2.7 percentage points. "This is having a profound effect on the top five mobile handset manufacturers’ combined share that dropped from 73.3 in the first quarter of 2009 to 70.7 percent in the first quarter of 2010,” said Milanesi.

RIM’s mobile phone sales reached 10.6 million units in the first quarter of 2010, a 45.9 percent increase year-on-year. RIM is making its debut into the top five worldwide mobile handset manufacturers ranking. RIM's focus this quarter was centred on its ecosystem strategy, its tightly integrated control of store, OS and device played to RIM’s strengths.

Smartphones accounted for 17.3 percent of all mobile handset sales in the first quarter of 2010, up from 13.6 percent in the same period in 2009.

Mobile e-mail, rich messaging and social networking will continue to drive demand for smartphones and enhanced phones that feature full qwerty hardware keyboards. "To compete in such a crowded market, manufacturers need to tightly integrate hardware, user interface, and cloud and social networking services if their solutions are to appeal to users,” said Cozza. "Just adding a qwerty keyboard will not make a device fit the communication’s habits of today's various consumer segments.”

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