News: Android hits the market hard in 2010

Worldwide mobile device sales to end-users totaled 325.6 million units in the second quarter of 2010, a 13.8% increase from the same period in 2009, research firm Gartner recently revealed.

Smartphone sales to end-users accounted for 19% of worldwide mobile device sales, an increase of 50.5% from the second quarter of 2009.

“Although the mobile communication devices market showed double-digit growth this quarter, average selling prices (ASPs) were lower than expected and margins fell,” said Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at Gartner.

“We attribute the decline in ASPs to a stronger dollar, a depreciating euro, and intense competition that drove price adjustments and changes to the product mix.”

Manufacturers such as LG and Samsung pursued market share in a low-margin market but this approach proved risky, as shown by LG’s decline of 27.8% in ASP in the second quarter of 2010.

While new product introductions from Apple, HTC and Motorola, along with the drop in ASPs, drove strong sales of smartphones, shortages of components, such as LED (AMOLED) displays impaired sales volumes of some of the more popular new smartphones said Gartner.

In the smartphone operating system (OS) market, Android expanded rapidly in the second quarter of 2010, overtaking Apple’s iPhone OS to become the third-most-popular OS in the world. In the U.S, it also overtook RIM’s OS to become the number one smartphone OS in this region.

“A non-exclusive strategy that produces products selling across many communication service providers (CSPs), andthe backing of so many device manufacturers, which are bringing more attractive devices to market at several different price points, were among the factors that yielded its growth this quarter,” said Milanesi.

Smartphone sales to end users totaled 61.6 million units in the second quarter of 2010, a 50.5% increase from the same period in 2009. The top four smartphone OS vendors exhibited growth in the second quarter of 2010, and accounted for 91% of the worldwide smartphone OS market, up 6% year-on-year.

Android hits the market hard in 2010

Related Articles

Most Read Articles

Have Your Say