Business

Saturday October 31, 2009

Global cellphone market set to grow in fourth quarter


HELSINKI: The global cellphone market is set to grow in the holiday sales-fuelled October-to-December quarter, after four quarters of falls, analysts said on Friday.

“We forecast handset shipments to grow 3% annually in the fourth quarter 2009, signalling an end to the recession,” Neil Mawston, analyst with Strategy Analytics, said in a statement.

The mobile phone industry is ending its worst year ever, with top handset vendor Nokia forecasting earlier this month that 2009 market volumes would fall 7% from 2008, indicating a small rise in the fourth quarter.

CCS Insight analyst Geoff Blaber also said the market would grow in October-December, but cautioned against over-optimism pointing to the steep downturn at the end of last year.

“This market still has some way to go before stability is restored across the value chain,” Blaber said.

Strategy Analytics estimated 291 million phones were sold in the third quarter, down 4% from a year ago.

Separately, research firm IDC estimated the market dropped 6% year-on-year to 287 million phones in the third quarter.

“During the third quarter, we saw a number of channels promoting older devices at significantly lower prices. For many, this was enough to spur demand and push volumes higher,” said IDC analyst Ramon Llamas.

The world’s second and third-largest handset vendors, Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics, continued to win more share of the market, with sales rising 16% and 37%, respectively.

Both Korean firms reached their highest-ever share of the cellphone market, with Samsung controlling 20.7% of the market, but still clearly behind Nokia’s 37%.

“This was the first time a vendor other than Nokia has shipped more than one-fifth of the world’s handsets since Motorola’s RAZR-heyday performance of 2006,” said Strategy Analytics’ Mawston.

Motorola and Sony Ericsson continued to struggle in the quarter, with both seeing sales almost halving from a year ago levels.

Sony Ericsson continued to lose market share for the seventh quarter in a row, while Motorola sold the least phones since first quarter 2001.

Apple’s share of the cellphone market volumes rose to its highest-ever of 2.5%, Strategy Analytics said. — Reuters

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