Q4 Results and other notes from Smartphone Bloodbath - LG, Lenovo, RIM, ZTE, Jolla, Vertu, etc

We are getting more results coming in from the smartphone bloodbath.

LG reports 8.6 million smartphones sold in Q4, up 23% from Q3, gives LG a market share of about 4% and now that the business is back away from loss-generating Windows smartphones to Android, the LG smarpthone business is safely profitable once again. Welcome back.

Lenovo, maker of the LePhone, reports strong growth in its smartphone unit, with 9.4 million smartphones sold in Q4, up 34% from Q3, giving Lenovo about 4% market share. Lenovo says 9 million were sold inside China and so far, only 400,000 sold outside of China, as Lenovo has started to sell in Russia, India, Indonesia etc. Expect the Lenovo LePhone to gain traction soon and likely propel the PC maker to significant gains also outside of China in the Spring of 2013.

Vertu the luxury brand was sold by Nokia and as soon as it got rid of Nokia ownership, it switches operating systems. Away from Symbian obviously but is Vertu going Windows Phone? Not a chance. They are going Android.

ZTE says it will be bringing out a smartphone running Firefox OS.

RIM changed its corporate name to Blackberry. It introduced two new smartphones to launch the Blackberry 10 operating system, one that looks like the generic i-Phon-a-Clone pure touch screen device, with a virtual keyboard, and another more classic Blackberry style with physical QWERTY in the typical Blackberry form factor. Nothing dramatic in the launch, these look like very competent 'me too' devices on a 'me too' touch-screen OS having most but not all required apps in the store, including Angry Birds. Can this revive Blackberry, probably not, but does it stop the rot, probably yes. Expect Blackberry to somewhat stabilize as long as we don't find major disasters in the next few months, like service outages or some hardware bugs..

And then on the tiny Finnish handset-maker startup called Jolla and their ex-Nokia MeeGo derivative OS, called Sailfish. Sailfish yes, is like 'MeeGo 2.0' and obviously is Linux based open source and thus a cousin of Android among other good things. Jolla is facing a huge task to achieve volumes to become meaningful, and their first big hurdle was passed when they secured a China retail chain reseller contract last year. They also announced their first carrier deal last year, but it was in the small domestic market of Finland where no doubt Jolla will sell if for no other reason, than for patriotic and Nokia-nostalgic customers. Now comes the second big news from the new boys from Finland. .Jolla has found a handset maker partner for Sailfish OS, a Chinese third-tier smartphone manufacturer called Zopo Mobile, who are targeting .. India. So now Jolla's Sailfish is going to be available in both of the two largest handset markets of the world. Good job Jolla !!! And good luck Jolla and Zopo.

FINAL Q4 AND 2012

I am awaiting the results of two companies to lock the rankings of the Top 10 for Q4 and am waiting for the last 2 analyst houses (Gartner and Canalys) to give their final Q4 total smartphone sales numbers, to be able to give us the final count and market shares. The two manufacturers that still can impact the Top 10 are Sony and Yulong ie Coolpad.

Sony is likely to sell something in the order of 10.5 million smartphones in Q4. That would put it safely in 5th place ranking in the Top 10, behind Samsung, Apple, Huawei and ZTE. But Lenovo did 9.4 million, if Sony were to fall under 9.4 million (Sony did 8.8 million in Q3) then Lenovo would take 5th ranking dropping Sony to 6th.

Then we are set for 7th, 8th and 9th - LG, ZTE and RIM respectively - but 10th ranking is still open. It is tentatively held by Nokia, with 6.6 million total smartphone sales in Q4, but in Q3 Yulong/Coolpad of China sold 5.1 million smartphones. The Chinese brands have all had a banner Christmas quarter and Yulong/Coolpad had been very popular in Q3, by some measures the second bestselling domestic brand in the China market. The global smarpthone market grew approximately 29% from Q3 to Q4. If I assign that percentage of growth to Yulong/Coolpad from Q3 to Q4, they would sell - exactly - .6.6 million units, and have a tie with Nokia. Lets hope we don't get a tie, and we get a clear decision one way or the other. I hope to know, it may be that Yulong/Coolpad does not announce its smartphone number and we are stuck with depending on the analysts and other such data.. But yes, the 10th position in the Top 10 is still open, either going to Nokia or Yulong/Coolpad.

So the Top 10 for Q4 smartphone sales globally looks like this:

1 - Samsung - 63.7 million (preliminary)
2 - Apple - 47.8 million
3 - Huawei - (approx 20 million)
4 - ZTE - 12.5 million
5 - either Sony or Lenovo - (Sony likely sold about 10.5 million)
6 - ether Lenovo or Sony - Lenovo sold 9.8 million
7 - LG - 8.6 million
8 - HTC - 7.0 million
9 - RIM - 6.9 million
10 - either Nokia or Yulong/Coolpad - Nokia sold 6.6 million
This data preliminary, full analysis coming as soon as the final data is reported

The overall market size seems to be pretty near 220 million smartphones sold in Q4 and a little over 700 million for the full year 2012. Again, we need to wait for Gartner and Canalys to weigh in before we'll have the final number.

I will of course do the full count and give also installed base updates, the annual sales, and the sales and rankings of the operating systems as well, as usual. Hopefully within a few days or maybe a week or so.

If you need Q3 data, Top 10 bestselling smartphones, Top 6 operating systems, and the global installed base etc, see it all here.

Comments

[John Waclawsky]

Thanks for the stats. An impressive count of smart phones. ...and the numbers keep saying the same thing:

NO ONE WANTS A WINDOWS PHONE

[cycnus]

@Tomi,

1.
I was wondering if you know the Micromax number?
Micromax is very popular in India, and their Android device sell like a hot cake.

2.
About RIM, taken from: http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2013/01/final-score-on-most-important-forecast-of-2011-once-again-tomi-ahonen-most-accurate-forecaster-in-mo.html
which graph do you think it would be?...

Thorsten Heinz say that RIM have 80 million loyal customer, to me, it's like between this graph http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/.a/6a00e0097e337c8833017d4082b38e970c-pi and this communities-dominate.blogs.com/.a/6a00e0097e337c8833017ee7f73aa9970d-pi

[Interested to know]

I hope Sony has finally turned the corner with their new Z series and healthy attitude to software updates.

[Winter]

People often assign importance to the size differences between the top 10 entries. Say, Samsung is selling almost as much as the next two together, or Apple is only two thirds of Samsung etc.

Don't! The sales in the top 11 is an almost perfect example of a Zipf's distribution. Zipf's distribution is a model of purely random selection by users.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law

The fit (using Tomi's estimates) is to a power law with coefficient -1.05 (theoretically 1). This power law explains 95% of the variation. This is an almost perfect fit for Zipf's law.

When you plot it, you see that Apple is the outlier, with an expected sales of ~30 million. Without Apple, the fit explains 98% of variation between brands (power law coefficient -0.97).

In short, the distribution of sales between the brands is like you expect for a generic competitive market. Apple is the odd one out who sold way more in Q4 than expected from this simple model. Nokia is still more or less on the line, but so far down that it becomes noise.

[firecracker]

Sup Tomi care to tell us how all these apple maniacs are running android devices? I.e. even the most loyal apple lovers are running android

[Spawn]

For LG and Sony: The question stays who's going to lose market share to them if they grow?

For RIM: Agreed. I think they will grow slighly from Q4 to Q1.

For Nokia: May fall a bit again below 4m in Q1.

So, is it Samsung or Apple or both who will suffer in Q1 and give some of there shares to Huawei, Sony, LG?

[zlutor]

Wow! Jolla in India. And China. From a `hundred people' start up...
Let's see how they run their business.

Go, Jolla, go! Keep the flag flying! :-)

[Den]

You need to cheer up. WP 7/8 is a decent OS. At least someone is trying to drift away from old icons based GUIs...