Category: Market

Market data & competition.

Switching rates for US smartphone users suggest 50% penetration by August 2012

The latest comScore MobiLens is out and it allows an update to the picture of the US phone using population. Through the three month period ending May 2011, smartphones were in use by 76.8 million or about one in three US phone users. Here are some other highlights:

  • A total of 513k users switched into using a smartphone every week during the period, a rate of switching consistent with the last 17 periods (average of 510k/wk).
  • Penetration of smartphones increased by 940 basis points, slightly higher than the 900 bp increase in the last period but consistent with average.
  • Using a four-period trailing average and linear extrapolation, 50% penetration will be reached by August 2012. “Summer 2012” seems a safe bet as that target has not changed much.

I’ve updated the countdown counter (Phone Tipping point at top of right column on this page) to reflect the new date.

The following charts show the penetration and switching rates.

 

 

 

The Android (in)adequacy: How to tell if a platform is good enough

About 10 years ago I met an advertising executive in New York who explained the difficulty of advertising a new brand of deodorant to consumers. “Most people never change their deodorant,” I remember him saying. “They pick one brand when they are young, and stick with it for a long, long time. If it works, why switch?”

The same theory can be applied to customers who are making the switch to smartphones today. Once they have picked a type of phone, whether it’s Apple iOS, Google Android or something else, it’s difficult, and often expensive, to switch. Consumers become comfortable with the interface and design of the phone and the apps they have purchased on that platform. If it works, why switch?

Many Smartphone Customers Are Still Up for Grabs – NYTimes.com

This quote says a lot. The notion that customers remain captive to a platform is well understood. After all, it seems impossible to get people to switch out of Windows (or Mac or iPod). Platform vendors are aware of this as the land grab for users seems to be running at full pitch.

However, there is a critical condition described in the quote above: “If it works, why switch?”  The condition which keeps users loyal is that the product they chose is good enough–i.e. “it works.” That’s a symptom of over-service and commoditization. If a product, like deodorant, is good enough you won’t be tempted to move to another brand even if it’s marginally better since the new brand has switching costs in the form of uncertainties (“Will it be as good? What if I don’t like the smell? etc.) People are inherently conservative and you can’t compete with comfort and familiarity by launching a marginally better product.

So with that in mind, why is it that millions are switching mobile platforms? Continue reading “The Android (in)adequacy: How to tell if a platform is good enough”

Capital.bg | Nobody wants to buy RIM

Технологии и наука | Хорацио Дедиу: Никой не иска да купи Research In Motion RIM – Капитал.

My thanks again to Andrian Georgiev for interview questions [Bulgarian] related to RIM. My answers to his questions (in English) are below:

Q: What should RIM do to reinvent itself? Should it stray from its business-oriented image?

RIM had begun to move away from a business image already in 2005 or so when it started its “Pearl” brand and a consumer-oriented strategy. The company probably foresaw that business customers would not be enough to maintain the growth they had become accustomed to. The strategy has led to a growing popularity in Latin America and other regions like the Middle East where the product is used as a low-cost alternative to SMS for avid texters. Even in the US, many teenagers use Blackberries instead of iPhones because they can use it for the BBM service (at a lower cost). I believe that it is not coincidence that iMessage was launched.

The company’s salvation is not in branching into new markets but in establishing a credible platform. When Nokia announced that they would be the “third option” after the iPhone and Android ecosystems, they did not even mention the Blackberry. The fact that Blackberry is not seen as an ecosystem is the root of the problem.

Q: How should RIM accelerate the introduction of QNX?

Continue reading “Capital.bg | Nobody wants to buy RIM”

The app industry vs. the music industry

By my estimate, Apple has paid out $16.6 billion to content owners. $2.5 billion to app developers and about $14 billion to music companies. The developer payments are published by Apple, the music payments are estimated based on total downloads and guesses about the split and pricing of that content (90% for the content and $1 to $1.2 average pricing over time.) There might be reason to move the music figure up or down but the difference will still be nearly a factor of 5.

The cumulative payments are shown in the following chart:

Continue reading “The app industry vs. the music industry”

iTunes now costs $1.3 billion/yr to run

The iTunes store continues to grow. The data that Apple published in the last event included the following:

  • 15 Billion iTunes song downloads
  • 130 million book downloads
  • 14 billion app downloads
  • $2.5 billion paid to developers
  • 225 million accounts
  • 425k apps
  • 90k iPad apps
  • 100k game and entertainment titles
  • 50 million game center accounts

As this data is added to the existing data and cross-referenced additional insight into the economics of iTunes is emerging.

Continue reading “iTunes now costs $1.3 billion/yr to run”

Getting to one billion iTunes accounts

There are 225 million iTunes account holders. 25 million joined in the three months. As the iTunes store has been operating since April 2003 it’s possible to step back and look at its history and measure the rate of growth relative to other ecosystems.

The following chart shows various platforms/ecosystems in terms of adoption. In the case of phone operating systems and consoles, the cumulative units sold is shown. The scale is 10 years by 1 billion users with users measured on a logarithmic scale. Continue reading “Getting to one billion iTunes accounts”

Songs, Books and Apps: What do the three media types tell us about the future of consumption?

The 200+ million iOS devices have caused 14 billion apps to be downloaded in less than three years. The iTunes music store caused 15 billion songs to be downloaded over a 7 year period.

The two media download totals are shown in the following chart:

About 9 months ago I predicted that Apps would overtake song downloads. I was off on the timing by a few months. The app download rate slowed down in the last few months. However, the crossover point is imminent. The song download rate is running at about Continue reading “Songs, Books and Apps: What do the three media types tell us about the future of consumption?”

Does the phone market forgive failure?

One of the details of Nokia’s warning which did not get a lot of attention was the mention that profitability for the current quarter could not be guaranteed. That is to say that Nokia may make a loss, perhaps for the first time in more than a decade.

This may not be that newsworthy except for the strange fact that as far as I’ve been able to observe, any company in the mobile phone market that ended up losing money has never recovered its standing in terms of share or profit (i.e. AMP index value has never recovered).

Here is a list companies that have “hit the rocks” in terms of mobile phone profitability and their fates (in no particular order). Continue reading “Does the phone market forgive failure?”

Is Nokia worth less than Skype?

Yesterday Nokia warned that its guidance for the quarter and the year were “no longer valid.” The surprise to me is that management was surprised. In February I warned that even if Nokia could fool consumers into buying products whose platform was publicly executed, distributors and operators would not likely go along with the deception. Pricing collapse is the proof of a channel breakdown.

That seemed predictable. What I struggled with was how Nokia itself could present such an optimistic forecast. Absent any explanation, Nokia’s forecast of robust sales for Symbian products into the near future belies a failure of understanding of the dynamics of platforms and especially the impact of destruction of trust and brand value that commenced in February. Distress is a slippery slope and it does not model well in a spreadsheet. It takes a leap of non-linear faith to predict the piling-on effect on the up- and the down-side.

Faith in the company’s guidance meant that the market reacted to the bad news by discounting Nokia down to a market cap of $26.7 billion. One analyst even cut his target price down to $4/share, 57% of yesterday’s close. How can this fair? What is Nokia’s phone business worth?

Continue reading “Is Nokia worth less than Skype?”

Microsoft has received five times more income from Android than from Windows Phone

Microsoft gets $5 for every HTC phone running Android, according to Citi analyst Walter Pritchard, who released a big report on Microsoft this morning.

Microsoft is getting that money thanks to a patent settlement with HTC over intellectual property infringement.

Microsoft is suing other Android phone makers, and it’s looking for $7.50 to $12.50 per device, says Pritchard.

HTC Pays Microsoft $5 Per Android Phone, Says Citi.

A rough estimate of the number of HTC Android devices shipped is 30 million. If HTC paid $5 per unit to Microsoft, that adds up to $150 million Android revenues for Microsoft.

Microsoft has admitted selling 2 million Windows Phone licenses (though not devices.) Estimating that the license fee is $15/WP phone, that makes Windows Phone revenues to date $30 million.

So Microsoft has received five times more income from Android than from Windows Phone.

Looking forward and assuming that Microsoft can receive this type of settlement from about half of the Android license takers, then the prospects of a windfall from Android dwarf the expected income from Windows Phone.

Google’s Android seems the best thing that could have happened to Microsoft’s mobile efforts, ever.

I could also calculate how the Android license income could be further funneled to Nokia (via their current agreement with Microsoft) for promotion of its phones. Thus, an Android licensee could reduce his margins in order to promote a competitor’s products.