Kantar November Numbers: Suggest Decline in Windows Phone and.. Increase in Symbian? Nokia is so doomed

A very accurate predictor of the current Quarter smartphone sales trends is a population-weighted average of the most recent Kantar numbers of the current quarter, compared to the previous quarter. We've now seen the pattern for many quarters and Kantar's numbers foretell very accurately what is the global reality on a very short term view, ie now in late December, with November sales data, we have a good view to Q4 (October-December) quarter sales.

Windows Phone 8 was supposed to excite the world and restore Microsoft and Windows to smartphones (yeah, when have we heard that before, and before, and before, and before). Nokia's brand new Lumia 920 and 820 were supposed to be the best Windows Phones ever made and somehow magical in restoring Nokia's past glories from America to China. With the parallel launch of Windows 8 for the PC environment, the Microsoft powered ecosystem was supposed to be on a big comeback. Well, I don't specialize in the PC world but rumors from that side suggest Windows 8 has been far worse in its early adoption than say Windows 7 was. This does not suggest a glamorous Christmas Quarter for Redmond on its main business. Well, at least we have the new Nokia Lumias and the HTCs and Samsungs and others doing the 'magnificent' new Windows Phone 8 smartphones, right? Enter Kantar. 

KANTAR SUGGESTS WINDOWS PHONE SALES ARE DOWN FROM Q3 !!

Kantar always gives us some of its markets it studies, not all. This time from the November 2012 stats they published, we have a good comparison to September Kantar data (both before Windows Phone 8 launched, and data that was reported in Q3). The regions that Kantar reported both in September and November are the European big 5 countries ie EU5 (Germany, France, UK, Italy and Spain), plus the USA, Australia and Brazil. When we take the population-weighted averages of those four regions, and calculate the Windows Phone market share then and now, we get this finding:

Kantar numbers population-weighted average for these 4 regions in Q4 suggested a global average market share for Windows Phone to be 5.3% (don't worry that the reality was only 2%, remember this is not a 'globally representative' sample of Kantar data, this sample strongly over-samples Windows OS's best markets, USA and Europe, and ignores the huge smartphone markets where Windows is negligable, such as China, India and Japan. The point we want, is to compare Kantar last quarter vs Kantar now.

What does Kantar measure for those same four regions now, for November? The weighted average of those same four regions says Windows Phone new sales market share has fallen to 3.8%. Yes, a drop of one third! So what was 1.9% global Windows Phone market share in Q3, these Kantar measurements suggest that after Windows Phone 8 was launched, the global market share for Windows Phone is now crashing to 1.3%. We rounded it to 2% last quarter (was almost 3% in the previous quarter) and Kantar numbers suggest we will round off the Windows Phone market share for Christmas at 1%. That is catastrophic.

Now, remember, the Christmas Quarter, Q4, October to November, does always feature a big jump in smartphone sales. I am modelling a 30% jump from Q3 data. So while the Windows Phone market share is down by a third (according to Kantar measurements) the actual sales are not down by much. If the global smartphone market grew 30% for Christmas, then the total global Windows Phone sales (both platforms, old Windows Phone 7.x and new Windows Phone 8) would be about 2.9 million units.

By The Way.. I did warn you, that the new Lumia 920 and Lumia 820 sales will underperform at Nokia compared to the first Windows Phone launches a year ago. I explained what factors were wrong, mostly in the executive management by Stephen Elop the CEO, who raised prices, not lowered them - raising prices means less sales. Who also limited his carrier relationships, limited distribution means less sales than broad distribution. Etc Etc Etc. I told you so...

ANY OTHER CONTRADICTORY DATA?

But wait, how about China! Yeah, Nokia's Lumia 920T that will launch for China Mobile on the Chinese proprietary 3G standard, TD-SCDMA, will not launch until January. So no help there. What of other Chinese smartphone sales on Windows? Informa has just reported that Windows Phone market share in China is 1%. When Analysys, Gartner and IDC have given China numbers for their latest reports, none mentioned Windows Phone at all, it is that small.

So don't expect miracles out of China. What other news? HTC is so disappointed in Windows Phone 8, it is withdrawing its lowest-price (best-selling) Windows Phone smartphone, the 8C from many markets including the US. And Samsung? Is focusing on its new Tizen devices for next year, don't expect Sammy to waste too much of their marketing efforts on the undesirable Windows platform right now.

Kantar numbers suggest Windows Phone, after Windows Phone 8 has launched, will still sell less than Windows Phone did in Q3? That is very bad news for Microsoft and for Nokia. But now lets look at the shocker.

SYMBIAN SALES GROWING SUGGESTS KANTAR

And this second bit of data must be devastating for Espoo and anyone near Nokia strategy. It is now 9 months from the last new Symbian based smartphones released by Nokia. The model range is obsolescent. The customers are being peddled new Windows Phone based smartphones instead. Yet those old pesky Symbian based Nokia smartphones have many of the features and abilities that Nokia owners want - like great cameras, like real physical QWERTY keyboards, etc. And what does Kantar data suggest? Those 4 Kantar-reported regions, weighted average suggested Symbian sales in Q3 of 7.7% in these four regions. And now? They suggest 7.5% market share for the same four regions. After we factor in the growth in sales for the Christmas quarter, the data suggests Nokia Symbian sales have jumped from 3.3 million to 4.3 million !!!

KANTAR NUMBERS SUGGEST 6.8 MILLION TOTAL NOKIA SMARTPHONE SALES

Like I said, the Kantar numbers are very accurate in short-term forecasting smartphone OS platform performance for the current quarter. And these findings suggest total Nokia smartphone sales of 6.8 million units for Q4 which they also suggest, would split 4.3 million on Symbian (and MeeGo), and 2.5 million on all Lumia, old and new, on Windows Phone. So compared to Q3, when Nokia only sold the 'undesirable' and suddenly 'obsolete' early Lumia smartphones, and now when the new Windows Phone 8 has launched, Nokia Windows based smartphone sales would be down by 13% while the industry grew 30% in the same period (real effective loss in unit sales of 43% in a 3 month period, after the new platform had launched). I call this a disaster.

And the customers? They refuse Windows Phone but they still accept Symbian (and MeeGo). So Symbian/MeeGo sales would be up - based on the Kantar numbers - from 3.4 million in the last quarter to 4.3 million now - an increase in absolute terms of 27% in Symbian sales from 3 months ago, but after we factor in the market growth, its slightly less than the 30% growth of the market, so Symbian would only lose 3% of its share in this past 3 months - with utterly obsolete and uncompetitive phones! (and zero management support of any kind). Incidentially, my recent spot-check of Chinese online sales of handsets found two Lumia devices as Nokia's bestselling smartphones in China. And two Symbian devices - the 808 Pureview and ... the N8 !!! (Why does moron-CEO Stephen Elop not give us a Lumia with 12mp camera, if the N8, at two YEARS of age, still is a top 5 bestselling smartphone in the biggest smartphone market on the planet? Hello?)

And do you really want to cry? Nokia' second best-selling smartphone in mid December online sales in China was.. the N9 running MeeGo. A smartphone that is 15 months old, but still outsells all Lumia smartphones except one and outsells all Symbian smartphones by Nokia. Why is idiot Elop not fully supporting the N9, selling this magnificient smartphone in every market, and launching its sister phone the N950 to the world? What is wrong with the brain of the CEO? And why is the Board still allowing the clueless Microsoft Muppet to run Nokia. He should have been fired long ago. The worst CEO of all time! (PS the continued very strong sales of the N9 and MeeGo suggest very promising starts for two new smartphone operating systems that launch next year - Sailfish the MeeGo next version that will power Jolla smartphones from Finland; and the Tizen alliance which will see first smartphones launched by Samsung and Lenovo in 2013. Tizen is what Samsung too of Nokia-discarded MeeGo and its partnership, and transformed now as a Samsung-led Tizen alliance. With such partners - PARTNERS - as NTT DoCoMo, Sprint, Telefonica, SK Telecom etc - some of the biggest mobile operators/carriers in the world)

If Nokia smartphone overall number is 6.8 million for Q4, that would be slightly up, 8% up, from Q3 and no doubt, the snake-oil-salesman ultimate spin-doctor-in-chief Stephen Elop of Nokia would proudly celebrate that his smartphone unit had growth. Don't be fooled, as the market grew 30%, it means effectively Nokia lost more than one fifth (in mathematical terms, the competitive decline is 22% of its market share last quarter) of its feeble remaining market position just over the past 3 months. Not 'grew by 8%' but rather, lost one fifth of what remained. Nokia's market share in smartphones - which was 29% just 24 months ago - would now fall from 3.7% in Q3 to 2.7% now in Q4. This, if Kantar's numbers are accurately indicating the total global market reality. Do remember, that Brazil is included in this data, so its not just the rich world markets we are looking at.

WINDOWS PHONE EVEN WORSE

And Windows? The Kantar numbers do suggest Windows Phone sales collapsing from Q3 to Q4. Market share falling from 1.9% to 1.3%. Total global Windows Phone sales falling from 3.3 million in Q3 to 2.9 million now in Q4. What collaborative data do we have? We hear that in most markets the Windows Phone based Nokia Lumia smartphones have been selling out. Selling out sounds good. Until we see what trick Nokia CEO has now been playing. The Next Web quotes Elop and runs a story on 20 December explaining that Nokia has deliberately run low initial rates of Lumia 920 and 820 unit production for Christmas, to help create buzz and demand and a feeling of success. Elop admits in his CNet interview on 21 December that "there's frustration due to limited supply. Our focus is on broadening distribution."

Deutche Bank analysts have severely downgraded their Lumia sales numbers saying their market checks reveal far lesser actual sales than initial hype suggested. And remember, if the mix of Windows vs Symbian phones is now reversing to more Symbian, it means Nokia average sales prices would plummet for Christmas, and likely loss-making in the smartphone unit again increase. Last Quarter the Windows Phone unit made a 49% loss per every Lumia smartphone sold. How much worse can it get? 

Then the other Windows Phone partners? I mentoined HTC reducing its Windows Phone 8 offering, including pulling the HTC 8C from many markets and not launching its large screen Windows Phone smartphone. HTC is focusing on where the profits and customers are - on Android obviously.

We'll see soon enough in January, but yes, I am now quite confident in my previous early gut-feeling forecast number that 6.8 million is roughly the level of Nokia total smartphone sales for Q4. The mix of Lumia on Windows Phone vs Symbian is very likely to switch to more Symbian!! So I expect Nokia to have about 63% of its smartphones now in Q4 running still on Symbian/MeeGo and only 37% running on all variants of Windows Phone. 

Meanwhile, globally, Windows Phone would have something in the order of 1.3% market share for Christmas and sell 2.9 million units. It would still remain smaller than Symbian now 22 months after Elop decided to sacrifice Symbian and MeeGo instead of Windows Phone. When Palm - once the world's second biggest smartphone platform - had fallen to about 1% market share (and very unprofitable), it had its mercy killing, being sold to HP and ended. How long will Ballmer keep the massive-losses-generating Windows Phone platform even alive? It will soon go the way of the Kin and the Zune and Microsoft will shift its focus only on the PC and tablet side of the Windows 8 operating system.

How long does Nokia have as a company? I said a year ago it was a dead-man-walking. I expect Nokia to be sold any day now.. In reality, lets see how the US fiscal cliff is sorted out, some sanity and stability is restored to Wall Street, and perhaps all those giant tech and consumer electronics giants sitting on billions of cash, will finally feel it safe enought to start the bidding war on the corpse that is Nokia, mostly obviously for its rich patents portfolio - did you notice again, Nokia picked RIM's pockets again on a patents fight, like it did with Apple about a year ago, etc. So realistically? Lets say a good time frame for when the Nokia take-over battle will happen could be around February-March'ish of 2013.

For those who took part in our Crowd-sourced forecast, remember, a little over a year ago, I asked my Twitter followers to suggest what market share Microsoft Windows Phone would have now at Q4 of 2012. The forecasts ranged from 0.4% to 43.2% with the average suggested at 10.1%. Haha, if Kantar numbers do foretell a reality near 1.3%, then currently the nearest guesses are with Gibson Tang, Maarten Lens-FitzGerald, Josie Fraser and Ben Fletcher. Good luck to all contestants. See the full contest and all entries here: Crowd-sourcing a forecast for Windows Phone.

Note: an early edition of this blog posting mistakenly identified the HTC handset as 8X when it is the 8C that is being pulled. The blog is now corrected.

One plug - For anyone who needs data and numbers on the handset industry, remember my TomiAhonen Phone Book with all the charts, numbers, data you would ever need to know, in a convenient pdf eBook formated for small screens so you can carry all the data right on your tablet or smartphone.

 

Comments

[cycnus]

@P.Boogie

/sarcasm
I'm certainly not rocket scientist.
But I like the "cheap copies"/"application launch pads" better than the most advance mobile OS.
Like I said, I'm not qualified for the most advance mobile OS since the FLAT LIVE TILES makes me feel bored and fall asleep.

[N9]

If Microsoft new OS's are sooooo great, how come no one is buying them?

[winter]

@P.Bokkelman
Around 40M Android phones are activated each month. Probably mor by now.

Less than 4M WP phones sre available each quarter. Not sold, but on sale. There is no ecosystem yet as there is no WP8 installed base. Not enough WP phones are produced to even outsell Bada.

Lumia 920 would have been the most advanced phone of 2010 or 2011 ( barely I think). But it is at the bottom in 2013.

[cycnus]

@N9

Because only P.Boogie, Balmer, Elop, Steve Belfiore that were the rocket scientist who UNDERSTAND the greatness of WP.

The problem is, billions of other people + you and me that were a mere mortal think android is better.

[newbie reader]

// http://regmedia.co.uk/2012/12/21/all_market_shares.jpg

This is an exellent piece of stat, for this US Apple 50% discussion above.

What it shows?

Country ;; iOS share 12w/e 27Nov11 ;; iOS share 12w/e 25nov12

US 35% 53%
EU5 22% 25%
GB 30% 36%
Germ 21% 22%
Fran 19% 24%
Italy 21% 20%
Spain 6% 4%
Austral 41% 35%
Brazil 3% 1%

Country ;; %of marketshare of iPhone5 release peak

US 17%
GB 5%
France 4%
EU5 2%
Germ 0%
Italy 0%
Spain -2%
Brazil -1%
Austral -5%

So, we see that ***this iPhone5 release peak is pretty much limited to US.***

It is somewhat extended to UK and France, but it is already zero in Germany and Italy, and even negative in Spain, resulting in 2.5% total average in EU5.

Given this country tendency, it is easy to see it to be even less, /most probably even negative/ in EU total.

And from what we see in the rest of the world, Brazil and Australia, even fresh release of iPhone5 cannot keep Apple marketshare from falling there.

If it zero in Germany, and is even negative in Spain/Brazil/Australia, it could easily be, that world total iOS marketshare is in fact falling, despite of iPhone5 release.

China number is important here, whether spain-brazil-australia tendency extend itself to china, that's the question, but this stat is unfortunately not availiable.

[Tester]

@newbie reader:

Don't forget another important thing here:

The 53% is not market share, it's share of sales. That means it includes all replacements.

Especially with Apple you need to factor in all those who replace their old iPhone - and I guess this year this was even higher than usual because many might have skipped the iPhone 4GS and kept their iPhone 4 for one more year.

Why this spike is only this visible in the US? Maybe it has something to do with specific promotions, special deals that made people jump the gun and upgrade immediately from their old iPhone whereas in other countries this is stretched out over a longer period of time. If that's true we'll see with the upcoming quarter's numbers.

[newbie reader]

Also, US is the only country, where /iPhone5 release peak/ of iOS is coupled with percentage decline of Android.

Let's group countries by this property,

country ;; android growth ;; iOS growth/=iPhone5 release peak/

iOS up, Android down:
US, -10%, +17%

iOS growth is about equal to Android growth:
GB: +4.9%, +5.3%

Android growth is bigger than iOS growth:
France, +9%, +4%

Android up, iOS flat:
Germany, +7%, +0.3%

Android up, iOS down:
Italy, +10%, -0.6%
Spain, +25%, -2.5%
Brazil, +31%, -1.6%
Australia, +11%, -5.4%

We see, that the ***most of the world is moving in opposite direction to US, even on "release peak" sales of iPhone5***

[Tomi T Ahonen]

To P. Bokkelman

I removed all your comments as your tone was pure Microsoft troll. If you feel you truly want to engage with readers of this blog - please note, that first, your comment MUST be relevant to the blog at hand. So you must discuss under this blog - the sales numbers suggested by Kantar, not your own personal views of why you think Windows Phone or Lumia is somehow better than other smartphones. That was not the topic of this blog (we've covered that months and years ago on dozens of earlier blog articles).

I also don't allow personal attacks and no comments that would require me to respond by saying 'if you read the blog article'. You may fully disagree with me - our our readers - but you must illustrate in your comment that you did read and consider the original comment. You can't just come here to astroturf and throw pointless links and ridiculous claims. Talk about the numbers here as suggested by Kantar, and if you have anything to support those - or counter those - that you think truly are relevant, and as long as you indicate that you have read the Kantar numbers too and make reference to those, then yes, your comment will be allowed to remain.

Finally, if you want to make any commentary of what I've said personally in the past, you better make 100% sure you quote me in context and accurately. For example that comment that Nokia will be sold within weeks is something I said last summer - and I have SINCE pointed out on this blog that I had been wrong. If I post about it here and take honest personal credit for being WRONG, you have NO right to come here to make such claims - unless you want to thank me for admitting where I was wrong - and in that case, you can only do that on the blog article where I did that, not on this blog article which dicusses the Kantar numbers.

We have had over 3 million visits to this blog and over 29,000 comments posted on this blog. I have a regular readership. They find big value in intelligent discussion on this blog. I won't tolerate trolling and astroturfing. But if you feel you really wanted to contribute, please repost again, but follow VERY carefully my instructions.

To our other readers, thanks, sorry for the delay in removing the trolling comments, but obviously it was Christmas break haha..

Pls keep the discussion going

Tomi Ahonen :-)

[Correction]

There is no HTC 8C. Maybe HTC 8S.

[vladkr]

@Cygnus
"Because only P.Boogie, Balmer, Elop, Steve Belfiore that were the rocket scientist who UNDERSTAND the greatness of WP.

The problem is, billions of other people + you and me that were a mere mortal think android is better."

In the Middle Ages, people used to think that the Earth was in the middle of the Universe; Galileo Galilei finished his life imprisoned as he tried to prove the opposite.

Maybe we should jail Elop and Ballmer and let them die there to prove WP is indeed a competitive ecosystem.

Oh... wait a minute; did I just compare Dumb and Dumber to Galileo Galilei? Damn, I'm sorry for such an insult... but you can keep the other last part of the comment.

[B a r o n 95]

@Newbie_Reader - Hey Genius, the iPhone 5 was only released in Brazil on December 14 - how the heck did you measure the iPhone 5 peak there?

You also have to understand that the iPhone 5 to iPhone 4S interval is shorter is much shorter in almost every country outside the US, because Apple released the iPhone 5 in more countries than ever from the get go (including Hong-Kong China on day one), and had more countries on-line faster.

Also, some countries, like Brazil and Australia are "noise" countries in terms of volume. US, Canada, UK, Japan, Germany and Greater China together account for over 80% of iPhone shipments.

And even if the peak was a US-only phenomenon, so what? Apple has NEVER gone above 50% share, in any previous peak.

This is a momentous statistic. Peak or no peak. The FACT, as reported by Kantar ( that Tomi seems to love and believe) IS that Apple sold more smartphones in the 12 week period than ALL the other manufactures combined in the largest (by value) smartphone market in the world.

You can try to explain that way as much as you want. But that is HUGE. Particularly since the US smartphone market is mostly a replacement market now. The overwhelming majority of iPhone 5 users were already smartphone users. So they were replacing another iPhone (60%), or migrating from another smartphone (80% of the remaining 40%).

There is no denying that Android users are switching to iPhone in very large numbers in the US.

And that was against the fresh Galaxy S3, and the heavily promoted Galaxy Note and all the Moto, HTC, etc Q4 introductions.

And what did Tomi do instead? He tried to spin it into a commentary of Windows Phone and Nokia which are no longer important market drivers. They are a rounding error on Apple's sales of the (free on contract) iPhone 4.

[newbie reader]

@tester
// Especially with Apple you need to factor in all those who replace their old iPhone

Yep, and BTW, there is probably ***no real Android sales decline in US,*** at least I have not seen such numbers.

US Android percentage decline number is just a math byproduct of "Apple iPhone5 sales spike"

Here is a model example.

1. Suppose that of every 100 phones sold, 35 are iPhones and 52 are Androids.

2. Then, all of a sudden, iSheeps spring up, go replace their old iPhonies, or for some other reason, and they buy twice the usual amount of the iPhonies, that is, 70 iPhonies.

3. Android user do not spike like this, neither they decline, but, say, they gained, as usual, from steady number of converts from other platform, say 5% marketshare, 5 more phones out of 100. That is, there are 52+5=57 Android phones sold.

3. Then iPhone share would peak from 35% to 70/135= 52%
however Android share, due to this spike, would fall from 52% to 57/135= 42%

That is, ***iSheeps-generated sales spike also inevitably produce some drop in Android percentage number***, not necessary at expense of steady Android growth, but exactly because Android users rise steadily, do not spike, and are unaware of this sudden iSheeps wave.

As we see in my model example /where I in fact used actual US marketshare numbers/, this 10% "iPhone5 spike" drop in Android share means only that Android buyers are steady people, who do not spike, like iSheeps, but grow their numbers in slow, steady and orderly manner.

And numbers show that ***10% drop, in fact, has enough space for Android usual growth*** /of about 5% quarter-to-quarter marketshare in my example/

And when market would be cleared from that iSheeps wave, this growth will show itself up.

To continue my example, suppose next time Android steadily got 5 more converts, and sells now 62 phones, however iSheeps swallowed their new iToy, and dropped from 70 back to 35, to their base marketshare.

Then, Android would rise from 57/135= 42% to 62/100= 62%, a whopping 20% rise! It's not Android sudden growth, no, it just iSheeps down-wave effect.

We see, that although iPhone5 ***up-part of the wave downed Android percentage***, the unevitable iPhone5 ***down-part of the wave would do exactly the opposite***, helping Android number back up, restoring all the numbers that it delusionaly took away.

It is reasonable to look at unit sales numbers /when they are availiable/ as Tomi does in his careful Elop/Nokia analysis, to be free from these false "spike effect" percentage impressions.

[vladkr]

Baron:

In your statistics, "Windows" includes WM6, WP7 and WP8, which are not compatible/don't interact with each other... so it's hard to call that an ecosystem. So it's useless.

[Tester]

@Baron95

That's truly ingenious. You accuse Tomi of using selective data and then take the one anomaly in the entire data comletely out of context and present it as big news?

Hello???
I still don't know what to think of this Apple number in the US - because with other data to back it up it doesn't mean ANYTHING!!!

For all we know Android merely hit a slump because no new devices were around.
The one thing that is certain is that Apple's number is highly inflated by all those replacing their iPhone 4 and 4S with iPhone 5's.

There's no info how this affects overall market share.
So before bringing out the champagne I'd rather wait for other information to properly place these numbers. It's just too anomalous from recent trends to derive anything further from it that Apple sold more devices in a quarter where it released a new product and Android did not.

As for Windows being the third ecosystem, yeah, well. No, sorry, fail again.

To be an ecosystem it needs to perform better. Right now it's merely the best selling platform of the non-ecosystems, and the only reason it's even that is that all the other platforms are obsolete and dying out.

I think it's pathetic that a supposedly thriving platform has to compete with zombies like Symbian, BB-OS and bada. Of course it wins that 'battle' by default - the opponents have nothing left to fight with!

So much for 'selective data picking'...

[Tester]

@newbie_reader:

Yes, precisely how I see it.
Unfortunately news don't work like that. They take the anomaly and present it as a significant trend.

And some idiots may jump for it and push the price of Apple shares up again into dreamland territory just to be shocked when they go down again later because obviously all predictions based on not treating the spike as an anomaly will not come true.

[Tester]

More bad news for Microsoft:

http://news.yahoo.com/microsoft-surface-trampled-bottom-tablet-pile-christmas-150544506.html

Haven't we heard this before?

>> While speaking with sales reps at the stores, Apple’s (AAPL) iPad was the most highly recommended tablet while Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle Fire line and Samsung’s (005930) Galaxy Tab line were both recommended as alternatives. Microsoft’s Surface tablet, on the other hand, was not pushed by reps at either chain.

[B a r o n 95]

@Tester - Every time an iPhone model launches there is an anomaly (according to you). This time is the FIRST and ONLY time the anomaly swallowed over 50% of the market and made Apple sell more than all other combined.

Even if you believe it is an iPhone launch anomaly, it is still incredible. And newsworthy, and the first thing reported by ALL analysts that covered the Kantar report.

I do not believe it is an anomaly. To me it is the culmination of a trend. In markets where iPhone is widely available (most of the top carriers) and not severely volume constrained, Apple takes 4 out of 5 high income subscribers and a ton of share from high-end Android.

@Newbie_reader - where do you factor into your numbers all the users that tried to buy an iPhone and couldn't?

Where to you factor the KNOW fact (based on multiple surveys) that 40% of iPhone buyers in Q4 are coming from other platforms. Symbian, RIM and Windows combined are only 5% of smartphone market share - all the rest is Android and iOS. Combine that with the fact that 2/3 of smartphone purchases in the US are replacement, and you can't escape the fact that, that millions of Android users are switching to iPhone. I personally know several who did just that. Galaxy, HTC and Moto to iPhone 5.

The next big event for Apple is not an iPhone launch. It is when China Mobile, Docomo, T-mobile USA, and other large operators launch the iPhone and of course, having the backwards Europeans launch LTE which is a huge drive for iPhone sales in the US.

Now the true "spike" was the Android spike in the US, first when only AT&T had the iPhone and all the other operators had to promote Android, then as the iPhone lacked LTE and Verizon (and others) had huge promotions for LTE (which meant promoting Android phones and tablets). That spike is OVER with iPhone 5 (well T-mobile, US Cellular, etc still only promote Android), but the big three, for the first time ever, have Apple and android on the same footing.

results? Apple ran away with the whole pie. Lets see what excuse you will come up with in Q1. And Q2....

happy new year

[newbie reader]

// we have a good comparison to September Kantar data

can anyone give link to these september data?

[Tester]

@Baron95:

Ugh...

You really want to tell that a quarter that fully covers the launch of a new iPhone model does not have a spike?

Yeah, right! We all know how Apple cusomers are! They immediately run to their stores and replace their old models - well, maybe not last year, since the iPhone 4S wasn't really that much of an upgrade to the iPhone 4, but if you factor this in as well, you got TWO generations of iPhones being replaced now!

So you not only get the spike, you get 1.5 times the normal spike!

And LOL at the 'backwards Europeans'!
Typical troll argument just to devalue the market that don't follow your 'rules'.

Why is it that people trying to push an agenda always have to resort to broad insults to make any counter argument look less valid?

[Tester]

@newbie reader:

>> an anyone give link to these september data?

Here you go, directly from the source:

http://www.kantar.com/media/104878/comtech_pr_p9.pdf

To make it short:

iOS 33.6%
Android 59.6%

in the US.

So from Q3 to Q4 we have a very drastic shift. If one does not call that a spike I don't know.

And one thing is clear: The spike is far stronger than last year for the iPhone 4S release. But honestly, that doesn't really surprise me. As I said before, last year looks like many iPhone owners held off replacing their iPhone 4 so this year they got all added to the spike as well.

All in all, this quarter's numbers are really not that informative. As soon as the first full HD Android devices appear, things will most certainly reverse again - and next year with the next iPhone model again.

To me the US market looks like it's mostly saturated already and mainly driven by hardware replacements, not by gaining new customers.