The iPhone hurts Nokia and grows to 18 percent of the European market of smartphones

27th June, 2010 by adina
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Recent data from comScore show Apple ranked second in the European market of smartphones in a period shorter than three years. The company has grown to 18 percent of the core European countries, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Spain, starting from scratch. It has maintained Microsoft at 13 percent, Research in Motion at 8 percent and Google at 3 percent. Nokia is still leading according to data of April, but its once-secure position is now only memory, as it has lost important share and reached only 58 percent.

Also reinforced by the study was the slow growth of well established manufacturers of smartphones as well as the growth of Android which is an important part of the context. The overall growth in the smartphone area was 38 percent in 2009. However, Symbian, Nokia’s preferred platform had only an 18 percent growth, which means 57 million users. Meanwhile, Apple has grown 161 percent and reached about 10 million users. Research in Motion has jumped 87 percent and has got 4.6 million users for its BlackBerry. Android has reached 2,429 percent, but had a very small share in the month of April 2009, which is the smallest share in the group, with 1.8 million users.

Windows Mobile has gained only eight percent during the past year and consequently has given away an important part of its relative share.

Apple’s situation is expected to be improved further by the launch of the iPhone 4. This would happen mostly at the expense of the Finnish company Nokia. The 600,000 pre-orders worldwide Apple has got are much higher than what was expected, while Nokia has low expectations for its spring worldwide sales. Apple’s launch sales could even be higher as in-store reservations and walk-in purchases are not included in this number.

The study has also mentioned that Symbian users, among European owners of smartphones, are the least likely to utilize their handsets for smartphone-level features. Almost all iPhone owners utilize their phones fully for applications, web and media. A net majority of Android phone owners have the same behavior.


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