Apple cracks top 10 among biggest phone makers

This was in the Financial Times on 28 Feb, 2008. Gartner reports that for the fourth quarter sales of handsets in 2007, Apple has reached the 10th spot with a 0.6% market share. That is a long way from even fifth place LG which has 7.1% market share, but still, in its first year, Apple has already become one of the ten largest phone makers in the world. Not bad, not bad at all. In particular when they aimed for the high end of the price range.

While we're on the numbers - the total phones shipped in 2007 according to Garner was even more than we've reported here before. Gartner says 1.3 billion new phones were sold in 2007. (bear in mind, that is 50% more than the total installed base of personal computers, and about the same number of total internet users worldwide or the total number of all fixed landline phones in the world. The mobile phone industry sold 1.3 billion NEW phones last year, up from 1 Billion the year before. Is this a growth industry or what). Also remember that the majority of phones now are sold as replacements so the total mobile subscriber count did not grow by 1.3 billion last year, rather by about half that.

So, for those interested in the fourth quarter handset market shares by Gartner:

1. Nokia               40.4%
2. Samsung          13.4%
3. Motorola           11.9%
4. SonyEricsson     9.0%
5. LG                     7.1%
6. RIM (Blackberry) 1.2%
7. ZTE                   1.2%
8. Sharp                1.0%
9. Kyocera             0.7%
10. Apple (iPhone)  0.6%

OTHERS             13.5%

Also of note, Nokia, Samsung and SonyEricsson are all growing strong, Motorola falling fast..

Big business. 1.3 billion new mobile phones sold last year, probably 1.5 billion this year. No wonder Apple, Microsoft, Google, Dell etc are all stampeding to mobile...