Some Smartphone Snippets: Nokia Q4, HP is Back, Tizen Delayed Again (Updates with Nokia Lumia ASP etc)

Lets do some smartphone items. We're in the Q4 results season and we have Nokia's numbers but Nokia is being naughty, decided not to give us the detail they have always given in the past... Also we have some good news from HP and some bad news from Tizen. Lots of bad news from Tizen. But lets take the Nokia numbers first.

NOKIA SMARTPHONE SALES DOWN AGAIN

So we did not get the actual numbers anymore. I predicted that Microsoft would be doing this when it takes over the Nokia handset business. I'm disappointed Nokia already now is resorting to this move. Why is Nokia not reporting the detail of its handset sales? Because they are down in what is usually Nokia's best quarter, the Christmas Q4 quarter. Nokia did not give us the details but in its Quarterly results it did tell us sequential sales revenues were down 5% for the total sold unit which includes the dumbphones and the smartphones. So in very rough terms smartphone sales should be down something like 5% sequentally from Q3 the last quarter we had the precise number at 8.8 million. Then we also learned that the average selling price is down for both dumbphones and smartphones (that drives down the sales revenue figure) but we learned that unit sales were flat sequentially for featurephones but down for smartphones. This leads me to believe that smartphone unit sales were down somewhat more than 5% sequentially from Q3, so I put it at 7% decline ie 8.2 million units.

Until we get a more official number from Nokia, that is my best guess of Nokia Q4 sales at 8.2 million units in its smartphone unit. That gives Nokia a preliminary market share of 2.5% for Q4, down from 3.5% in Q3 (as I predicted it would happen after Microsoft took over the failing Lumia smartphone business from Nokia). Oh, and the overall handset sales are unprofitable again..


UPDATE - note only moments after I posted this, apparently Nokia already confirmed the smartphone number as 8.2 million haha... not bad guesswork eh? I haen't seen the number yet, that was based on a tweet. I'll go dig for it but we can safely assume 8.2 is the right number and if it is not., I will update this blog again.



UPDATE - as we didn't get the usual info from Nokia smartphones like regional splits, average sales prices etc, its nice that some of the detail is emerging. Mobiili.fi the Finnish mobile industry magazine reported that they counted the revenues based on the info that was out, at 1.1 Billion Euros for the smartphone unit in Q4 (this is down 12% from Q3 when usually Nokia reports 25% jump in smartphone revenues in the Christmas quarter). They also kindly calculated the Average Sales Price ASP for the Lumia lne which was 134 Euros in Q4, down from 143 Euros in Q3. So not only are the customers abandoning Nokia massively when the industry has its best growth quarter, they are not willing to pay as much for the Lumia handsets even with the big phablets and other new devices like Lumia 1020 etc - the Microsoft purchase has damaged the already struggling Nokia Lumia line even more if that is possible Thank you Mobiili.fi for the calculations and I know many of our readers on this blog will appreicate at least those details of total smartphone unit revenues and the ASP for Q4.

Let me mention also one truly brilliant piece of writing by Tero Kuittinen at Forbes - not only reporting on the Nokia Q4 results but also about how and why the US analysts tend to misanalyze Nokia so badly, and why this bodes badly for Microsoft's purchase of the Nokia handset unit. Definitely a must-read article!


For the full year Nokia sold thus about 30.5 million smartphones and had 3% market share, down from 35.0 million in 2012 and 5%, and down from 103.6 million in 2010 the last year before Elop's doomed Microsoft strategy when Nokia's market share was 34.8% and the handset unit grew 52% unit sales and generated Nokia record profits... That is the end of the Nokia tale in smartphones. Sad end but yeah, we saw it coming didn't we on this blog. Lets move to the other news.

HP IS BACK

Hewlett Packard is back again into smartphones, promising us two phablets which will run Android. Lets see them soon! Welcome back HP! For those who still remember, HP bought struggling Palm and planned new smartphones using WebOS but then after a new CEO joined the company, HP suddenly announced the end of its smartphones business in 2011. It then sold the WebOS system to LG. But now they've seen the light again - as PC sales globally fell last year but smartphone sales grew by nearly half. 2013 saw roughly 3 times the sales of smartphones than traditional personal computers in volume and most major PC makers are also smartphone makers led by Lenovo. Now HP has seen it has to be in this game and is back. Very good news and hopefully we'll see some good innovation from HP and not only some 'me too' devices.

TIZEN IS DELAYED (is this the end?)

So this was supposed to be the period of great news for Tizen. We heard suddenly from Japan that NTT DoCoMo will not release the first Tizen smartphones in Q1 now after all. Then shortly after that we heard that Samsung won't release a Tizen smartphone in the first quarter either. What was expected to be big news at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona with many Tizen anouncements and demos is now apparenty winding down. Some rumors suggest one Tizen phone may be out by ZTE but overall, what was seen as the strongest play of the new platforms is seriously damaged by these news.

I take the NTT DoCoMo news as the most significant. That was my reasoning why Tizen had such a strong insider advantage in the race for the new platforms (Sailfish, Ubuntu, Firefox etc) because NTT DoCoMo controlling about half of the Japanese market had a large enough smartphone customer base to alone sustain an ecosystem. If NTT DoCoMo is out of Tizen, the prospects are really bad. And NTT DoCoMo's strong past support has now turned sour. Then the other obvious big player is Samsung. Now that Sammy also is delaying its first Tizen device that is bad news. We also hear separately that Intel is moving away from its smartphone ambitions (why?) so the whole Tizen world is coming apart. We heard earlier that one of the big brands in the partnership, Panasonic was pulling out of all smartphone business (this was befoe these items of Tizen news, middle of last year) but that was one potentially big hardware brand for this alliance.

So my enthusiasm for Tizen is obviously severely dented. It might still work out, but there is no opportunity if there is no handset. And those handsets will do nothing if there is no carrier support. Before we can believe in Tizen, we need both. At the moment both are severely delayed..... We'll keep monitoring this space. More news expected soon in the smartphones end-of-year results. 

Comments

[Nhick]

Oh, welcome back HP..

[vladkr]

Pity for Tizen. Jolla is making all mistakes they can do, Ubuntu already failed, Firefox...hmm, any news ? So Tizen is the last platform that could be an alternative.

[e_lm_70]

Congratulation again on the prediction of Nokia / Lumia sales ;-)

With time also Apple will start to suffer the Android pain.
The parallel with the PC market in early '90 it is embarrassing.
There was an early leader Symbian, in the process to divert Symbian customer to MicroSoft, they just killed Nokia & Meego, and let Android accelerate their growing.
Now the market is growing, but it is hard for any new (Mobile OS) player to have any hope.

The Windows Phone future with direct and sole involvement of MicroSoft it is hopeless.
It will be nice to see some prediction about how badly and quickly MicroSoft is going to collapse in the mobile world next year.

Tchuss

e_lm_70

[willz]

@vladkr

"Jolla is making all mistakes they can do [...]"
What do you mean? They had a decent start and as far I follow them on Twitter they do great community work. Also they are delivering updates fast like in the "NFC bug with the other half" (NFC was always on and therefore sucked on the battery).

Firefox on the other side was the only OS that had three OEMs (Geeksphone, ZTE and Alcatel) that came out with real products and also seemed to have a good support by operators. They have a clear roadmap with major releases every 12 weeks. I use my Geeksphone Peak on a daily basis with Firefox OS 1.3 and think that it does the job really well. Sure it is not on par with Android in a lot of details and I would say that at certain points it is where Android was in version 2.2. However, Mozilla is bringing it forward really heavily and I see the potential. I know some of you guys keep saying "HTML5 won´t bring it never ever". But fun fact: out of the challengers we looked at one year ago (Tizen, Jolla, Ubuntu, Firefox OS) it is the only one that was shipped on real devices to real customers by more than one OEM. Also developing for it is rather easy. So to sum it up: I´d rather bet on Firefox OS than on Windows Phone ;)

[jj]

The only reason Windows Phone was selling at all was Nokia brand. So, after Nokia sold phones to Microsoft, last Nokia fans were lost also .

[vladkr]

@willz :
Nice to read that Firefox is shipping... couldn't find this information, nor any test or review.

About Jolla, they have real problems in communication,
they're shipping unfinished product...
no other half, because they don't provide information to make/manufacture them, then no different colours available, as promised in May,
customer care is disastrous,
and they don't ship outside EU, despite promises made to 40Euros preorders customers, for "legal reasons" (that's not to mention they don't respect EU laws, what doesn't prevent them from shipping in the EU)

They have no clear business plan. They have very good programmers, but they didn't think about hiring project managers or lawyers. Until now, they offered jobs only to super geeks like them... today they posted job offers for customer cares, which is a good start, but still, they don't care about the organization of the company.

And to finish about Jolla, their aim is to collaborate with the "community". Problem is that major players of this community can't get a jolla because they're not in Europe. Even Nokia, when it was planning the N9 to be killed, gave N950 to chosen programmers, what was a real good idea.

If you follow them on Twitter, you can see that 80% of their replies are "stay tuned", and that's not a good sign. Jolla looks like a student project, where spirit and the idea is more important than the result.

[John Fro]

This is not like the PC market in the 90's, this is like the PC market in the mid-80's, but unless you are 40+ y.o. you would not remember that. By the mid-90's all anyone was talking about was software. Hardware was commoditized Intel chipsets and competition was only for video cards and a few peripherals.

[WonTheLottery]

Mozilla did the right thing releasing Firefox OS in countries that didn't have a well established smartphone market so they could knock the rough edges off it before competing in more mature markets.

Telefonica have stated in countries where they've officially released Firefox OS phones they account for between 9 and 12% of their sales.

[Earendil Star]

The bad news from Nokia is really interesting.

Nokia is performing badly not only on their smartphone business (what is going to MS), but also on what is staying.

I think we are starting to see the first signs of customers being disappointed by what they bought. They were promised miracles, they got (as usual with MS) a half baked beta product with a tiny app ecosystem.

Plus, former Nokia fans, after the smartphone division was sold to MS, have no longer any reason to support Lumias. They were buying Nokias, not WPs. So sales are tanking again. During a period (Christmas) when they should experience stellar growth... ooops.

Curious to the what the usual astros will have to say... will it be just the usual denial? I bet it.

[Baron-9-5]

This is comical. To gloss over the fact that, the minute DoCoMo got its hands on the iPhone with the CEO Kato san himself holding one up in triumph on launch day, they dropped Tizen.

Who wants a distraction when 75% of phones sold by DoCoMo after iPhone launch are iPhones.

Which just goes on to prove that it is the iPhone that killed Tizen. Not Android.

DoCoMo and China Mobile were the one-two punch of the holiday selling season (Chinas is just underway for Chinese New Year this month). Next year, the large screen iPhones should finish off all Android at the high end, save Galaxy.

Then on to the other 200 operators like India's top 2 that still don't have official iPhone support in their stores.

Apple will continue to squeeze all the profit from the market. How? By delivering high end subscribers back to operators. Just like they did at Verizon and DoComo, and are about to do at China Mobile.

Nokia is a side note. Sad excuse for a company. Lazy, bloated, sclerotic, bubbled up by the GSM cartel, only to die the second the Silicon Valley boys showed up to the party.

[Earendil Star]

Wow the reality distortion field. Somebody is hallucinating. Again.

Fact: Nokia, the lazy, bloated, sclerotic company actually thrived and was n.1 worldwide until the Silicon Valley boys showed up, and ignorantly screwed up everything.

But one thing is true: Nokia has become a side note. It's MS the actor now, and it's tanking. Yeah, the Silicon Valley guys. Precisely.

[Baron-9-5]

Nokia thrived EXACTLY during the GSM and early UMTS bubble.

Similarly, Blackberry thrived EXACTLY during the North-America email-centric bubble, got a life extension in the poor countries with SMS bypass with BBM.

Both cratered EXACTLY like I said they would (way back in 2010), the second that Apple and Android started penetrating the 3rd world markets they were hiding at.

Don't confuse GMS-ETSI-carttel induced bubble with corporate excellence.

Nokia is, and was, a bloated, ridiculously uncompetitive entity. A house of cards. Which came down the second there was a little bit of West Coast wind.

[KPOM]

Samsung had a BIG miss in earnings today. If Apple misses in its announcement on Monday, it is the industry. If they meet or beat, then it is a sign that they have the right strategy and that Samsung's market share at all cost strategy has its limits.

[Winter]

Peak Windows Phone?

[John Fischer]

Funny comparisons with the pc industry. It took over 30 years to have just over a billion PCs outhere, microsoft was king with that echosystem but apple will die having just 600 million fanatical sheeps aproaching a billion soon.

Tizen dead means huge problems for samsung as they only offer cheap hardware getting cheaper

It seems to me that apple is the new microsoft during the 90s. Controlling their software and sales around it ... Free means cheap users and cheap users don't bring much to the table, google knows this and has failed with over 60 projects ( see google graveyard) trying to find their next big thing.... For now, one company one product

Interesting, Tomi when do we get one of your phenomenals insights ONLY dedicated to the handset market over 500 US .

[R]

It's interesting to watch the emerging smartphone platforms. I prefer to remain optimistic that at least one of them will catch on.

Jolla is shipping, but it's far from finished. It's realizing the apprehension I felt about how Nokia donated a lot to the community, but kept crucial parts of the UI and OS proprietary. Jolla had to redevelop those from scratch.

Firefox OS is also shipping. As a non-profit funded mostly by Google, they can financially afford a lot of development time.

Ubuntu Phone isn't shipping yet, but Canonical is doubling down on their investment. They realize that mobile is crucial to the future, so it looks like they will burn all of Shuttleworth's personal fortune if they have to.

[indian]

@Baron-9-5 "Then on to the other 200 operators like India's top 2 that still don't have official iPhone support in their stores." Official or not we do not buy phones from carriers. Carrier have zero impact on mobile market hence iPhone is at less then 5%. Subsidy would not work here. Its capitalism you get what you can pay for!

[WonTheLottery]

Tizen is far from dead, as well as Samsung, ZTE and Huawei smartphones it will also be in Toyotas, Jaguars, Land Rovers, smart TVs, cameras, white goods etc...

Samsung withdrew from consumer sales in Japan in 2007 and their sales of smartphones in Japan is very small compared to almost anywhere else on the planet. Everything the world used to buy from Japan they now buy from South Korea instead, that and the history between the two countries means South Korean products are a hard sell in Japan.

It was very unlikely DoCoMo would ever have been a big customer for Samsung's Tizen devices, even if we took their commitment to it at face value. The significance of this announcement is being massively overstated.

@Baron95
If ever there was a house of cards it's Apple, a < £100 Android blows their featurephone out of the water. They are the living proof you can fool some of the people all of the time.

[DWZ]

HP had an opportuinity to establish a strong mobile footprint with WebOS, but now all they can do ist to make some "me-too"-Android devices. Sorry, no bright future for HP. Nokia Lumia fare well - no sales at all here in Germany during December period.

[winter]

@LeeBase
"Then Apple's numbers will come out and they are going to be block buster big."

Indeed, they will. But Android figures will be block buster big too. Every year, we see record breaking Apple numbers during the holidays. And every year we see that Apple's average market share over the last year has shrunk compared to the year before.

Given what I saw in the shops, there might be big surprises in Android tablet sales.