Smartphone Sales Slow–And May Get Worse
Smartphone sales grew at their slowest rate ever during the third quarter, though it’s a good bet that the record won’t last long.
Tech companies sold 36.5 million smartphones—devices that can connect to the Internet and perform other tasks in addition to making calls—in July, August and September, according to researchers at Gartner. That’s 11.5% more than the same period in 2007, which is the slowest growth rate Gartner has ever recorded. Nokia sold 15.4 million of its devices, Research In Motion sold 5.8 million BlackBerrys, and Apple sold 4.7 million iPhones. Nokia’s sales for the quarter shrank 3%, RIM’s grew 81.7% and Apple, which introduced a new iPhone around the start of the quarter, saw its sales grow a staggering 327.5%.
A Gartner spokeswoman says the company doesn’t have preliminary fourth-quarter numbers. But here’s one reason to expect them to be much worse: RIM said this week that the number of new subscribers it signed up during September, October and November grew 57% compared with the year-ago period. New subscribers and unit sales are different metrics, but they’re related. So invoking some fuzzy math and a little common sense, it looks like sales dropped off (surprise) right around the time the market collapsed.
In other smartphone news, the industry is still fragmented when it comes to the operating systems that runs the devices. Four different mobile operating systems—Symbian, RIM, Apple’s Mac OS, and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile—were installed on more than 10% of the phones sold in the third quarter. That’s important because the games and other applications that are supposed to help drive smartphone sales have to be written for specific operating systems. (Say what you will about Microsoft, but having one dominant PC operating system does make it easier for application developers.)
-Ben Worthen
