Apple Moves up to Fourth Place in Global Mobile Market, Passes RIM

From DailyTech: Sales rankings in the mobile sector are a bit confusing. There's OS market share, there's smartphone OS market share, there's hardware market share, and there's smartphone hardware market share. To make matters worse, both domestic (U.S.) and global numbers are often tossed around ambiguously. Still there's some merit to these various numbers, if you make sure to put them in the proper context.

This week market research firm IDC published a new report looking at total global hardware market share. For Apple the report is a nice pat on the back. The company was in sixth place last year, but this time jumped two spots, passing RIM and the struggling Sony-Ericsson to settle into fourth place.

That performance comes courtesy to a record 14.1M handsets moved in (calendar) Q3 2010. Shipments of iPhones almost doubled from 7.4 million units shipped in Q3 2009. That performance looks particularly impressive given that the iPhone 4 sales were almost certainly effected by a number of quality issues, carrier exclusivity, and tough competition from Google's Android OS.

While RIM was passed, it can take comfort in the fact that it bumped its shipments from 8.5 million units to 12.4 million units, a testament to its continued appeal to business users. RIM is currently in fifth place in total sales.

The news was decidedly worse for Nokia. It managed a razor-thin growth from 108.5M units shipped in Q3 2009 to 110.4M units shipped in Q3 2010. While that was enough to help it hang on to first place in sales, competitors (Apple, RIM) posted larger growth, dropping Nokia's market share from 36.5 percent to 32.4 percent.

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