SMARTPHONE MARKET SHARES
This chapter will focus mostly on the market shares of smartphone brands. The next section will
be a short introduction about smartphone pioneers and in the end the new era of smartphone
with IOS and Android being the dominants
4.1 Market Fragment
GRAPH 8. Smartphone Market Share (Adapted from IDC 2015)
Period Android IOS Window
Phones
Blackberry
OS
Others
2015 Q2 82.8% 13.9% 2.6% 0.3% 0.4%
2014 Q2 84.8% 11.6% 2.5% 0.5% 0.7%
2013 Q2 79.8% 12.9% 3.4% 2.8% 1.2%
2012 Q2 69.3% 16.6% 3.1% 4.9% 6.1%
22
As can be seen from graph and table above, Android still dominated with 82.8% market share.
Samsung is still the greatest contributor with a lot of hit products such as Galaxy S6 and S6
Edge. However, it seems to be that Samsung is losing customers to its number one rival: Apple.
Apple has experienced a significant growth from 11.6% in 2014 to 13.9% in 2015. Sales of
iPhones totaled 48 million during the second quarter compared to 35 million in the year-ago
quarter. In the meantime, Samsung market share dropped from 26.9% to 21.6% even the
company sold managed to gain $76 million compared to $72 million last year profit,
it seemed
to be that the company hasn’t abled to keep pace with Apple.
As for Windows Phone, they has able to get 0.1% higher than the previous year. And frankly to
say, things don’t look to go nicely for Microsoft since its market share dropped significantly
from 3.4% in 2013 to 2.5% in 2014. However, the company’s mobile platform still able to stay
on a steady road despite the fact that a huge number of their customers have shifted to another
brand, Windows Phone still manage to have almost double the number of users compare to
Blackberry.
Blackberry seems to hasn’t able to turn around its fortune just yet. The company continued to
decline its share globally. Over the last 3 years, their shares has dropped more than 4%.
Apparently, Blackberry will have a hard time try to get back to its position.
4.2 Fading day of smartphone pioneers
History is always a part of who we are and it is crucial to look back at the pioneers of smartphone
to understand how they gained all their success, which phrases were the prime time and the
reason for their failures.
What we learn after these stories is the chance to look at ourselves
nowadays, to learn from mistakes and to develop in a different way.
4.2.1 Palm
23
Palm Inc. was founded in 1992 by Jeff Hawkins with a headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.
Talking about Palm, surely no one can forget the phone Treo600 - one of the first smartphone
in the world. On April 28- 2010, Hewlett-Packard – CEO of HP announced that the company
would purchase Palm at $5.70 a share for $1.2 billion. But in 2010, HP has sold a large amount
of Palm trademarks to a Chinese Tech firm called TLC. This may be due to the very poor sales
of Touchpad which made HP announced that the company would end any production and
support of all Palm and WebOS designs. The situation is bad enough in 2013, in an interview
with Fierce Wireless, former Palm CEO and webOS creator Jon Rubinstein has said that: “Im
not sure I would have sold [Palm] to HP. That’s for sure. Talk about a waste” (Bilton 2013).
