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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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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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LG announced its very first Android phone — the GW620. The new LG GW620 comes to the market with a 3-inch full touchscreen display coupled with a side-sliding QWERTY keypad. According to the phone maker, the new handset comes with support for social networking sites, which have attracted a larger number of mobile users lately, and is also meant to offer the smartphone experience accessible to typical users. The messaging capabilities of the device have also been enhanced, LG notes, and professionals will find the LG GW620 a great option. The new LG Android phone is slated for launch in the fourth quarter of the ongoing year in Europe.

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Worldwide mobile phone sales totalled 286.1 million units in the Q2 2009, a 6.1 % decrease from the second quarter of 2008, according to Gartner. Smartphone sales surpassed 40 million units, a 27% increase from the same period last year, representing the fastest-growing segment of the mobile-devices market.

Worldwide Mobile Terminal Sales to End Users in 2Q09 (Thousands of Units)

Note: This table includes iDEN shipments but excludes ODM-to-OEM shipments.
Source: Gartner (August 2009)

Nokia maintained its leadership position, but its portfolio remained heavily skewed toward low-end devices. Its flagship high-end N97 smartphone met little enthusiasm at its launch in the second quarter of 2009 and has sold just 500,000 units in the channel since it started to ship in June, compared to Apple’s iPhone 3G S, which sold 1 million units in its first weekend.

Samsung and LG both had a very strong second quarter of 2009 with sales of 55 million units and 30.5 million units, respectively. Samsung’s touchscreen devices, qwerty phones and smartphones drove sales in mature markets, and Gartner expects it will continue to gain market share in the second half of 2009 to close the gap with Nokia. Gartner expects LG to keep moving into lower-tier devices to drive growth in emerging markets and be well-positioned to take advantage of China’s 3G rollout as it can deliver good-value-for-money devices. Motorola’s sales of 15.9 million units were slightly better than expected, but its presence has rapidly concentrated on the Americas, and it has lost most of its share of the Western European market, where it sold fewer than 1 million units in the second quarter of 2009. Most operators and customers will be waiting for Motorola’s new Android-based products planned for the fourth quarter of 2009.

Sony Ericsson’s market share dropped 2.8% points year-on-year in the second quarter of 2009 but its volume dropped 41%. Although the market environment was challenging, Gartner attributes Sony Ericsson’s poor performance to its uncompetitive range of handsets.

Worldwide Smartphone Sales to End Users in 2Q09 (Thousands of Units)

Note: For HTC, Gartner counts only the company’s own-branded devices, including the G1.
Note: Totals may not add to 100.0 percent due to rounding.
Source: Gartner (August 2009)

In the smartphone OS market, Symbian held 51% share, down from 57% a year ago, while RIM and Apple grew their shares year-on-year. Android’s share was just under 2% of the market and more Android-based devices will come to market in the fourth quarter of 2009, intensifying competition in the smartphone OS market, particularly for Symbian and Windows Mobile. Microsoft’s share continued to drop year-on-year to account for 9% of the market in the second quarter of 2009.

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During the past week, two new types of innovative mobile devices were launched, both answering current trends in the mobile and internet arenas.

The first is the LG GD910 wrist-watch phone that was launched by Orange in France. I can still remember the early days of the mobile phones, when the marketing pitch was that the mobiles will become an accessory that you always carry with you, just like your wrist-watch. Today, I only carry a mobile phone (actually two…) and no wrist watch…

Orange and LG are combining the two gadgets into one great looking watchphone. This “technological masterpiece”, as was described by Orange, has almost anything that a “bling-bling” gadget should have – it’s got a very elegant look, it’s a 3G/HSDPA compatible touch-screen video-phone with a VGA camera, MP3 player, diary, Bluetooth, speech-recognition and others. Oh, and it can also tell the time.

The price at the Orange shop starts at 899 € with an Orange contract.

The PR by Orange: http://www.orange.com/en_EN/press/press_releases/cp090807en.jsp

The second device is coming from INQ, and is designed to answer the extremely growing popularity of the Twitter service. To date, there are several applications for the various platforms (mainly for iPhone), that provide an intuitive interface, allowing to easily and quickly tweet from wherever you are. INQ Mobile took this trend one step further, and launched last week two models of 3G Social Mobile phones.

The INQ Chat 3G comes with a full qwerty-style keypad and has a new email client that was developed by INQ that incorporates free push Gmail.  The INQ Chat 3G comes complete with the expanded suite of INQ applications; Facebook, Skype, email, IM and Twitter. It is equipped with a 3.2MP camera and a built-in GPS.

The smaller brother, the INQ Mini 3G, is a slimline Social Mobile that offers Twitter, Facebook, IM, Skype and web-based email services like Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and GMail. This model is smaller in size, and comes with a more modest 2MP camera and no GPS.

Both phones have plug and play HSDPA modems enabling high-speed wireless broadband on PCs and Macs, and should come with Brew 4.0 and Java MIDP 2.0 for application development.

The INQ Mobile devices are not yet available, and are expected to be in the shops towards the end of the year. There is no indication about the expected price, but the company claims that it will be “affordable”.

The PR by INQ Mobile: http://www.inqmobile.com/media/press/#1443

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269 million handsets were shipped in the second quarter of 2009, according to ABI Research.

Samsung (19.4%) and LG (11.1%) did particularly well. LG notched up a 2.2% increase in percentage points, Samsung, 1.45%. Nokia staged a remarkable swing in fortunes to achieve a 1.67% percentage point increase to 38.3%. Nokia is doing all it can to get a number of smartphone models into the market. It will be interesting to see how Nokia’s market share holds up in 2H-2009, as Samsung and LG have carried out major refreshes to their smartphone product lineups. Sony-Ericsson experienced a 0.56% percent point reduction in its market-share while Motorola and RIM also saw contractions.

Top 5 vendors:

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LG officially launched their application store, with more than 1400 apps already available for download. The LG app store is currently available in Australia and Singapore, and will be launched in 22 more countries with 14 different languages supported by the end of the year. The number of available applications is also planned to grow beyond 2000 by that time.

Currently, the app store only provides content for the two most recent WinMo-powered handsets of the LG: GM730 and KS20. The company promises, however, that more handsets will join the list in the coming months.

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