Visualizing smartphone platform growth

None of this should come as major surprises, but Gartner’s data allows for a bit more granular detail in the overall view of the market. Here are new points derived from Gartner’s sell-through data:

• The smartphone market is growing at nearly 100% (96%).

• The overall market is growing at 35%.
• The non-smartphone market is growing at 25%.
• Android grew at 1,340% y/y. iOS grew at 92%, Symbian at 61% and RIM at 40%.
• Platform market shares (below) shows a more even distribution of platform volumes between four main platforms:

• Non-branded mobile phones grew to 33% of the market, with 141% unit growth. This is an alarming figure for the low-end of the market. The unbranded market excludes ZTE and Hauwei which grew below the overall market growth (9.8%, 27% respectively). The implications were most dire for Motorola (-36% units growth), Sony Ericsson (-23%) and LG (-14%). Nokia grew but, at 3.5%, well below market growth.
• In 3Q 2009 41 million smartphones were sold. In 3Q 2010 80.5 million were sold. If we were to split the growth among platforms, nearly half the growth was Android. 27% of the additions were Symbian and 16% were iOS. Only 8.3% of the growth was RIM devices.
• Windows Mobile and Linux were the only smartphone platforms to shrink volumes. However, even though the platform is deprecated, 2.2 million Windows Mobile devices were still sold last quarter — more than Android sold a year earlier.