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Global mobile phone sales rose 10% year over year and 11.3 percent last quarter according to two research firms, Strategy Analytics and IDC.

Strategy Analytics said global handset shipments reached 324 million units last quarter, which represented a 10% gain over the same quarter in 2008.

Nokia, Samsung, and LG held the top spots in global market share during the quarter, with Samsung creeping up on Nokia’s 39.8% market share. Strategy Analytics found that Samsung shipped 69 million phones globally in Q4, a company record that was up 31% over the year before quarter. Likewise, and not surprisingly, Apple shipped a record 8.7 million iPhones during the fourth quarter and grabbed a 2.7% hold of the global phone market. Motorola said yesterday that it estimates it holds a 3.7% share of the global phone market.

2009 4Q Global Handset Shipments And Market Share (Units in millions)

Source: Strategy Analytics

Research firm IDC offered a similar outlook on the global market by stating that phone sales grew 11.3% in the fourth quarter. It said vendors sold 1.13 billion phones worldwide during the year, which was down 5.2 percent from 2008. Despite a flat market in Asia and a decreasing one in Latin America, sales in North America and Western Europe increased year over year. The firm also listed Nokia, Samsung, and LG as the market leaders with Nokia maintaining a 38.7% market share, Samsung a 17.1% share, and LG with an 8.8% share. The report said Motorola and Sony Ericsson lost market share.

Top Five Mobile Phone Vendors, Shipments, and Market Share, Q4 2009 (Units in Millions)

Source: IDC Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, January 28, 2009

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A new report out from Gartner indicates that Apple ranked third in worldwide smartphone sales in Q3 2009. The seven million iPhones sold by Apple in 3Q09 earned it a 17.1% share of the global smartphone market.

Meanwhile, Nokia’s share of the smartphone market reached an all time low in the 3Q09 at 39%, compared with 45% in 2Q09. This caused the Symbian OS to lose ground too, while RIM reached 20% share, its highest yet.

Worldwide Smartphone Sales to End Users in 3Q09

In the smartphone OS market, Symbian finished first with 44.6%, while RIM’s BlackBerry OS finished second with 20.8%, and the iPhone finished third with 17.1%. Android picked up momentum but with only a handful of Android devices available, its share remained modest at 3.5%. Sales of smartphones running the Window Mobile OS declined by 20% to 7.9% of the total smartphone OS market in the third quarter.

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The mobile phone market showed slight signs of recovery in Q3 2009, as 290.5 million cell phones were sold during the quarter, according to Strategy Analytics, or 287.1 million units, according to IDC.

All five major handset vendors sold more phones in Q3 than in Q2, save for Motorola, which slipped to fifth place, previously occupied by Sony Ericsson.

Samsung and LG, the two South Korean giants, both broke new records. Samsung shipped more than 60 million phones in a quarter for the first time, so it now controls more than 20% of the market, as expected. LG shipped only 31.6 million units, but it is its highest number to date.

Global Mobile Handset Shipments and Marketshare – Top 5 Vendors (Units in Millions) – Strategy Analytics

Top 5 Mobile Phone Vendors, Shipments, and Market Share, Q3 2009 (Units in Millions) – IDC

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According to the Market Intelligence & Consulting Institute (MIC), smartphones equipped with Android will reach 6.5 million units in 2009 and grow to 31.8 million units in 2013. Also, the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for Android phones will be significantly higher than the overall CAGR for smartphone shipments. Overall shipments of Android-equipped products, which include PC-like products and portable and residential devices, will reach 126 million units in 2013.

According to MIC, the increasing number of Android products and the variety of hardware specifications will lead to program-related problems. This will lower the willingness of developers to make investments and limit the performance application programs.

The Android Market’s 13,000 available applications lag the Apple App Store’s 85,000 total. But if Google accelerates the promotion of paid download programs in other regional markets, MIC says, it might significantly increase the willingness of application service developers to invest and rapidly increase the number of application programs to attract more users.

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A new report from Juniper Research predicts that shipments of open source Symbian handsets will more than double over the next five years. However, the platform faces strong competition in a smartphone marketplace which is increasingly targeting consumers and “prosumers” as well as corporate customers, with the result that its overall market share will remain virtually unchanged over that period.

The Open Source OS report found that Symbian handset shipments were likely to reach 180 million by 2014, up from 87 million: this, allied to a steady increase in Android and LiMo shipments, will push the total open source handset market beyond 220 million by that time.

The Juniper Research report observed that while the developments by the LiMo Foundation, OHA (Android) and the Symbian foundation may suggest that the entire market is migrating towards open-source OS, Apple’s hugely popular iPhone product is in fact based on a proprietary operating system. RIM (Research in Motion) Microsoft and Palm also utilize proprietary operating systems in their respective smartphone products. However, with over 60% of the smartphone market now using an open-source OS, there has still been a significant a shift in position from proprietary to open-source.

The report found that the move to open source OS has encouraged developers to design new and attractive applications, providing a massive opportunity for innovation in the mobile telecoms industry. However, with a sharp growth in handset shipments over the next five years together with somewhat more modest increases of handsets shipped with Windows Mobile and Blackberry platforms, the race is on for a growing share of the future smartphones OS market.

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Market research firm Yankee Group estimates that nearly 7 billion U.S. smartphone app downloads will drive $4.2 billion in revenue by 2013. And with the number of smartphone users set to quadruple to 160 million at the same time, Yankee Group uses just two words to describe the market to come: gold rush.

Yankee Group offers key insights for developers and app store owners to position themselves in this market and be profitable:

• Fit the app to the platform. The target platform(s) should be chosen based on the nature of the app.
• Price your apps appropriately. Paid apps will account for one quarter of all downloads in 2013. While 99-cent apps are the norm now, Yankee Group predicts that paid apps will cost $2.37 on average by 2013, increasing today’s $343 million download market by more than 10 times over those five years.
• Focus on marketing. App store owners need to attract developers by marketing their apps and promoting the store’s successes via top 25 lists, download counters and running revenue tallies.

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