10 Takeaways from Analysts' Device Market Statistics

Originally posted over at mobiThinking, dotMobi's statistics and industry digest site, a look at 10 key takeaways from the latest stats from the leading analysts, Gartner, IDC, Canalys and Strategy Analytics. Worth reposting here given our focus on devices:

1) 1 billion smartphones were sold in 2013 (IDC)… or very nearly a billion (Gartner; Canalys).

2) Smartphones outsold feature phones in 2013 for first time ever. Smartphones accounted for 53.6 percent of total handset sales (Gartner). N.B. this doesn’t mean that there are more smartphones than feature phones in use (not by a long way).

3) Smartphone growth is driven by low cost smartphones, particularly in developing markets. In China and India the average price of a smartphone will soon be less than US $150 (IDC) – the average price worldwide is around $337. Lack of innovation among high-end phones means people who already have a high-end phone see little reason to upgrade (Gartner).

4) Smartphone growth is driven by developing markets. While developed markets are rapidly reaching smartphone saturation (in some nations smartphone penetration is already, or is nearly, 50 percent), developing markets are still showing rapid expansion. India is now the fastest-growing country with 167 percent growth in smartphone sales in Q4 2013, and Latin America was the fastest growing region with 96.1 percent (Gartner).

5) China is the world’s largest mobile phone and smartphone market (by a considerable margin), while the hyper growth is now starting to slow a little, a mind-boggling 420 million smartphones are expected to sell in China in 2014 (IDC). • The vast size of their domestic market has been a considerable factor in the growth of the Chinese handset vendors. In 2013, five of the world’s top 10 mobile handset manufacturers are Chinese: ZTE, Huawei, TCL, Lenovo and Yulong. Two of the top five smartphone brands are also Chinese: Huawei and Lenovo.

6) The Android operating system (OS) powers 78.6 percent of smartphones, outselling the nearest competitor Apple’s iOS 5:1. Sales of Android handsets are expected to reach close to 1 billion sales in 2014 (Gartner).

7) One in four handsets sold in 2013 was a Samsung. Samsung’s share of the overall handset market grew to 24.6 percent (IDC; Gartner). The South Korean giant sold around 450 million handsets in 2013, almost twice as many handsets as the number-two vendor, Nokia. If trends continue, Samsung could ship half a billion mobile phones in 2014 (Strategy Analytics).

8) One in three smartphones sold in 2013 was a Samsung. Samsung extended its dominance in smartphones to 31.1 percent (IDC; Gartner). It sold a record 300-314 million smartphones, more than twice as many as the number-two vendor, Apple. • Flashback: in 2011, Samsung and Apple were neck and neck in smartphone sales. Back in 2010 Nokia sold twice as many smartphones as Apple and four times as many as Samsung… three years later, after dumping the Symbian operating system in favour of Microsoft, Nokia is out of the smartphone top 5 and has sold its decimated handset business to Microsoft. • Customer choice is key to Samsung’s success. As mobiThinking pointed out last year, Samsung offers a vast array of handsets, smartphones and feature phones with various operating systems, sizes, functions and price points. By contrast, Apple, offers very little customer choice.

9) Apple is still growing, but slowly. Apple’s sales growth fell from 46 percent in 2012 to 13 percent in 2013. This is attributed to its lack of presence in the low-end smartphone segment and the big-screen phablet category (Strategy Analytics).

10) Things change rapidly in the smartphone market. Just between 2012 and 2013, three of the top five have changed: Huawei, LG and Lenovo have displaced Nokia, HTC and BlackBerry as the third, fourth and fifth smartphone vendors. Lenovo, which purchased Motorola (this is expected to help it expand into international markets) from Google in 2013, is predicted to double its market share in 2014 ( Canalys).

The death of the feature phone and/or the death of the smartphone

Now that smartphones sales have overtaken feature phones and there is little to distinguish low-end smartphones from mid- to high-end feature-phones in terms of function or price, is it still rational to distinguish between the two types of handset? Is there anything tangible (except a so-called smartphone operating system) that makes a smartphone smart and a feature phone dumb?

Tables 1&2: Top feature phone and smartphone manufacturers by global sales

• See Table 3 below for smartphone operating system market shares.

Table 3: Smartphone operating systems