News from the Smartphone Front: Blackberry Results, other news

So some updates

 

Blackberry gives Q2 results, sold 6.8 Million smartphones but made a loss. The good news is that for the first time since 2010, Blackberry (ie company previously known as RIM) has generated a quarterly increase in smartphone sales. Yes, all through 2011 and 2012, every quarter-on-quarter RIM ie Blackberry saw ever-declining sales. That fall has been ended, as I predicted the BB10 powered sales have reversed the trend and Blackberry sees a very healty 13% increase in unit sales for the quarter, where this quarter globally is usually about flat for smartphone sales. But BB is still in the red, so this is no time to celebrate. The BB10 based new phones accounted for 39.8% of all Blackberry smartphones sales, that is very good and note it is far faster ramp-up of the new OS than for example Nokia was able to do with the introduction of Windows in its first two quarters. Now folks over there in Waterloo, get the business back in order and return Blackberry to profits!!

 

Market relevance? Blackberry's prelim market share for Q2 is 3.1%, up from 2.8% in Q1. Blackberry makes a strong case that it should remain in the Top 10 (and someone else should fall out or remain out).

So who is out? We heard from Digitimes reporting on Chinese sales for Q2, that Coolpad (ie Yulong ie China Wireless) did a whopping 8.4 million unit sales. So Yulong is rather safely 'in' in the Top 10, locking up its place there. And we've heard from India that Spice has introduced its first Coolpad smartphones for the India market, so Coolpad is now following in Huawei, ZTE and Lenovo footsteps, taking the Chinese smartphone brand abroad.

 

HTC which dropped out of the Top 10 for the first time last quarter, said they had shipped 5 million of the new HTC One smartphones. So if we count say 3 million of that as sales, HTC should be in for a good rebound, into the high 6 or low 7 million level.

 

So that leaves us with Nokia. Nokia promised with Q1 results that Lumia sales would be up at least 28% this quarter. So from 5.6 million we should see 7.1 million Lumia sales. If we toss in a couple of last Symbian sales, Nokia would then be in roughly 3.3% market share. But how is Lumia doing? We have the usual early data points - ComScore reports that Windows market share in the USA is down slightly from their previous quarter report. But Kantar reports that US sales in April were up in the USA vs their numbers from February. A mixed bag for America. How about the rest of the world? Kantar April vs February comparison gives us increased Windows sales in the UK, Australia and China, but decreased Windows sales in Germany and Italy. Again a mixed bag. I would expect somewhat growth for Nokia yes, but I doubt they won't get to the promised 28% level. And that brings Nokia tantalizingly close to the high 6 million level as well. Blackberry's 6.8 million number is the threhshold. If Nokia clears that, sells 6.9 million, they are safe. If Nokia falls below 6.8 million smartphones, then its down to how well HTC did, to see if Nokia drops out fo the Top 10, or if HTC remains on the outside. If Nokia sells more than 6.8 million, then the same waiting game would be for Blackberry. And as we know, the frustrating part is that HTC does not release their unit sales number so we have to wait for other sources to give us that number....

 

Ah, the intrigue, eh? Some other little bits of news. Sony confirmed their total 2012 smartphone sales were 33 million (I had counted them at 31.9 million. Not bad 'guesswork' haha...)

 

Motorola is vanishing. They dropped already out of the Top 10 last year so I'm not actively monitoring them or counting them but we heard, they only sold 1.2 million total smartphones in Q1. Going, going, Motogone.

 

European market we see Nokia still sells 37% of the dumbphones there but only 5% of the smartphones according to the European market analysis by IDC. Sadly the market for phones in Europe is already at 3 out of every 4 phones being a smartphone, so again, Nokia once was well ahead of this curve, selling more smartphones than dumbphones in its 'home market' but then Mr Elop came to town and wrecked all that.

 

Oh, talking about the Fired-CEO-Walking dude, there were news stories from Finland that the Nokia Board has been having emergency meetings. Lets hope it was about firing Elop and looking for a replacement CEO. And there were also stories that a top Microsoft mobile guy was visiting Finland. Yeah, total accident of timing. I hope they negotiated the deal to sell the Lumia unit - with Elop included - to Microsoft and Nokia could get rid of its Microsoftian nightmare...

 

Hey, Sony! Sony has taken 3rd place in European smartphone market according to IDC. Nice come-back Sony. Keep that up now, go return to the US market too and lets see the Xperia line as one worthy of the leadership of the Sony brand.

 

Thats whats brewing now in the smartphones space. More as it develops.

Comments

[cyc.nus]

Tomi.

I dont think BB in the good shape.
They sell the bb7 device with hefty price cut in order to look good.

And i was wondering when micromax of india will reach top 10. I heard india now is yhe third largest market

[AndThisWillBeToo]

You say roughly half of the HTC sales would be HTC One. I say it would be a disaster. What manufacturer (save Apple) calls it healthy signal if one model out of so many sells half if the units?
Short term perhaps it would be OK but not in the long run.

[E.Casais]

You say "Coolpad is now following in Huawei, ZTE and Lenovo footsteps, taking the Chinese smartphone brand abroad".

Just checking here: I thought those Chinese manufacturers we never see in Europe (Coolpad, Oppo and the like) were already quite present throughout Asia -- e.g. Thailand, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Indonesia. This should have implications on the plans of Blackberry, Nokia, Apple to hold on or penetrate those markets.

Overall, I have the impression that a lot is happening outside the stars Korea, Japan, China. I would welcome some update of yours about the "other" Asia.

[Tester]

Blackberry didn't die because of BB 10. They died because BB10 was endlessly delayed until it was too late. This is a classic case of not having any competetive product in the market. BB7 was already way behind the competition when it was new.

Had they had it ready when they were still strong, things might look different.

Then again, things might also look different, had Nokia managed to sit out the time until the first MeeGo device was ready instead of throwing everything away, setting themselves on fire and selling out to the biggest slave trader in the electronics business.

Both companies made fatal mistakes, albeit quite different types of mistakes - and today we see the results of this.

[Esau]

How come that the story doesn't tell anything about Siilasvuo, leader of the gang?

Siilasvuo made some profitable years with Windows (bugs). He built an enormous house in Kuusisaari Helsinki by Windows bugs money.

Siilasvuo been worried that his business is goin down along with Windods going down. So he had to support poor Windows on mobile.

Finland is not happy.

Please Siilasvuo, leave your post!

[Esau]

Actually Siilasvuo. Move to some lonely island. You have money to make it.

Some months, and the truth will be relieved. Move away.

[jj]

Who the heck is Siilasvuo?

[CN]

@jj

C'mon jj. Ensio Siilasvuo, one of the most famous Finnish Generals. And his father, Hjalmar, great hero of Suomussalmi fights.

;-)

[jj]

@CN
Oh, that one. Dead General explains it all.
And I thougth Elop was "the General"...

[Hansu]

Even if Blackberry shipped 6,9 million BB devices their actual subscription base dropped by 4 million from 76 to 72 million users
http://www.theverge.com/2013/6/28/4473742/blackberry-q1-2014-earnings-bb10-sales-revenue-subscribers

[eduardo]

BB is 3.1%. That means, by my calculation (correct me if I am wrong), 94% of all smartphones sold now run on a open-source, unix-like OS kernel.

[cyc.nus]

@tester

Well said.

@troll

Nokia have a great ecosystem with symbian/meego/meltemi. They have QT/Ovi(mail,maps). Its not as strong as google ecosystem but it WAY ahead compared to blackberry no-ecosystem just BBM=free-chat.

BB phone pre-10 is not a smartphone. Its a overpriced feature phone. Its not comparable to nokia ecosystem.

[cyc.nus]

@hansu

Good information. I think this is the reason of bb plan b (to release bbm for androis/iOS).

[Tester]

@Fernando:

Sorry, wrong conclusions all around, typical American-focussed nonsense.
And of course, like Baron 95, you are ignoring the real reasons why Blackberry and Nokia lost out.

Blackberry: Not having a competetive product in the portfolio for 3 years will cost you most of your market share. BB10 was simply too late.
Nokia: Throwing away all the influence in the market, betting instead on a system that was extremely weak and that they have no control over.

Sorry, but if I read all this 'Nokia had no other choice than to go WP' nonsense just makes me cringe. Nokia had many choices and any other would have been a better option.
Nokia with WP started from zero. The 'Ecosystem' was completely non-existent when Nokia announced the change.
By comparison, despite being weak compared with Android and iOS, the Symbian ecosystem at least existed. They were already working towards strengthening it and pulling their successor OS (MeeGo) into it by unifying development under Qt. And despite all the problems they had, had they seen it through, they would have ended up with something with market power.
Now they got: Nothing! Nothing at all!
Take a look:
They don't own an ecosystem. Microsoft does.
They don't get profits from app sales. Microsoft does.
They have to pay license fees for each phone they sell.
They have no control over how the user interface of their phones look. WP8 allows no differentiation.

And if you say that Google owns the Android ecosystem, you are right of course, but just mostly. Samsung got their own app market and nobody prevents other manufacturers from creating their own. That's quite unlike Micro$hit who, like Apple want total control over everything their 'partners' do. As a result, aside from Nokia, nobody takes WP seriously. And you can bet, once Nokia gets a decent CEO, the first thing he'll do is preparing a more diverse portfolio. And once Nokia releases an Android phone, WP will be toast. Make no mistake, I said it before and I'll say it again: WP only sells because there's still people out there who want to own an Nokia phone and don't care about anything further because they have no clue.I find it not surprising that surveys state that the vast majority of Lumia buyers are first time smartphone users, i.e. people who don't have the knowledge to know all the background stuff.

[Huber]

@Fernando:

WP only looks cool for people who not know much about smart phones. It is a locked down, Apple-wannabe-approach which failes spectacularily in the marktet.

I have only met one person who thought his Lumia is cool. I simply downloaded Launcher8 for Android, started it and showed him that I can also have those tiles.

Only then he realized that a good OS lets you chose the launcher you want and does not force these ugly tiles on its users.

Also, BB is in a different situation: They would have needed BB10 in 2011. In 2013 it is too little, too late.

Nokia OTOH had one third of the smartphone market when they made the decision to go exclusively with WP.

Result: 3% market share two years later. Only an imbecile can see this as some kind of success for Nokia.

Back then Nokia could also have gone the Samsung route: Release WP and Android devices and use Meego as backup.

Nokia would do much better today with a sane strategy like that.

The problem is not WP, the problem is that Nokia is WP-only. And since almost nobody wants a Windows phone, almost nobody wants a Nokia smartphone now, too.

[Hansu]

@ Huber the thing about Nokia in 2010-11 and Blackberry now is that they have to pay the software development R&D from their own pockets now if Nokia had gone the route you said they would have had to pay for Symbian, Meego, Android, Windows Phone and Meltemi/Series 40 develpment from their own pockets Symbian alone was a Billion or so expanditure ad to that the rest you would be looking at an extra 3-4 billion on software expenses so and in turn would have meant that Nokia would have had to had atleast 40-50% market share in all categories in order to make the operation profitable. Ad to that the old inefficient Nokia managament and other aspects and you would have a very unsure recipe

[Huber]

@Hansu: Samsung does exactly that and is profitable.

Of course Nokia would have had problems to achieve this with theit bloated and unefficient organization.

This is why Nokia would have needed a competent CEO instead of Elop. He would first had to define a sane strategy and then execute it.

Elop chose the wrong strategy and then executed it poorly. This is why Nokia is i trouble.

[Hansu]

@ Huber true but Samsung has that distinct advantage over the competition is that they are larger Nokia was and is a big corporation but Samsung is way bigger and Samsung makes almost everything themselves from the screen, memory, processor and the rest of bits and pieces which in turns means that they control the entire chain and that in turns means faster product development. Samsung also has the luxury of if one thing does not succeed try something else so even if the smartphone business would have for some reason gone belly up and consumers would not have taken Samsung devices no matter we make a million other things the company will survive, Nokia on the other hand is phone maker if that fails well it's pretty much game over

[Tester]

Sigh...

Why are there still people who try to defend Elop's actions?

You know what? All that R&D costs would have been ammortized by owning the ecosystem. Now all the profits go to Microsoft and Nokia still got to pay the OS licenses. Yes, good deal, indeed.

[geektech]

You forgot to mention that every OS out there is trying to copy MeeGo/Harmattan, Maemo and Symbian?

Just take a look at ios7 multitasking, remember Symbian? But Apple sell it like new feature to its customer who never had a smartphone before.

Camera UI on WP8? Like Nokia N9 camera UI, there is not smart people, developers at M$ anymore? Pathetic!

Not to mention Qt, supported on almost every OS, except WP.

I really hope Nokia can survive and bring back the old glories, but, that will only be possible getting rid of fishy people in management.