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Smartphone Wars: Apple, LG results for Q1 plus Samsung and industry

Again just quick notes as I'm heavily traveling but some are waiting for this info

Apple results out obviously. iPhone sales down 11% from Q4 to 61.1M and prelim market share is down to 17% from 20% last quarter. The large screen bump to the iPhone is now subsiding clearly. And obviously the silly stories of iPhone being bigger than Samsung are now well past us. Apple is still making by far biggest profits - we won't dwell on that on this blog, we acknowledge it, Apple has by far best loyalty also. 

LG reported a far better performance in Q1 vs Q4 with essentially flat sales in a period when the market is down. LG total smartphone sales were 15.4 million, down 1% from 15.5 million in Q4. The market share for LG is up from 4.1% to prelim 4.3%.

Then two of the big 3 analyst houses have given their counts of the total global smartphone market for Q1 of 2015, Strategy Analytics counted 345 million, and IDC counted 336.5 million. These numbers seem too small to me and may be later revised upwards, but we'll have to go with what they say for now. I was expecting this period to be significantly bigger sales, powered by China sales for their New Year gift-giving. But yeah, lets see if we get a Canalys number at a higher level perhaps to bring the average up somewhat, but yeah. Suprrisingly weak Q1 compared to recent history how the market had performed.

Samsung gave their Q1 numbers but as normal, didn't give their smartphone unit count. However the two analyst houses did give their counts of Samsung and that average of those two is at 82.8 million so its pretty safe to say that Sammy contiunes being the world's largest smartphone maker with a healthy gap to Apple at number 2, and note, Samsung sales are up 11% this quarter where most of the quarter didn't have the new Galaxy S6 and Edge models even for sale. (Again I think the total count of the market by IDC and Strategy Analytics this quarter was too conservative...)

Ok thats the quick update. I'll collect the rest of the smartphone maker data as they come out and do the Q1 total market data as soon as enough info is available. 

Ah The News We've All Waited For - Nokia Is Returning To Smartphones. Nokia China President Mike Wang Confirms to Chinese Press. And yeah, obviously they will be Android smartphones - UPDATED: Nokia Denies (on a Sunday?)

Ah yes! This is THE news we've been waiting for. Nokia will return to smartphones. I can die happy.


UPDATE 26 Apr 2015 - two days after the story broke and as lots of sites started to report the story, Nokia has on 26 Apr - yes on a Sunday - officially denied this matter and Nokia.com has a clear statement "These reports are false, and include comments incorrectly attributed to a Nokia Networks executive.. Nokia reiterates it currently has no plans to manufacture or sell consumer handsets." Read the whole (short) statement here. Please note that 'currently has no plans' does not mean 'will never' and the end of 2016 is still far away... (and to quote BBC TV comedy series Yes Minister/Yes Prime Minister, 'never believe anything that is not first officially denied' haha..). But yeah. Lets calm down for now, Nokia clearly wants to move slowly (if at all) in this instance. The rest of this blog is as I wrote it on Friday 24 Apr when the news broke, and we may well want to return to this blog in coming months and about a year or so from now...


So yeah, its now reported in many Western media sources that MIke Wang the President of Nokia in China told Chinese press that Nokia will set up an R&D facility in Sichuan (South-Central China, regional capital city is Chengdu) which will support the upcoming Nokia smartphone production. And the press stories say Nokias new smartphones will ship in 2016. Thats almost day-after-tomorrow in handset years (vs human years, dog years, internet years). This is awesome news for us fans of mobile phones. And great for competition and for good consumer experiences and for innovation. 

Well, what should we expect? The early Nokia re-entry will not be huge scale. Nokia has to grow its total handset operation from handset model line to factory production (initially probably outsourced but also probably soon produced in Nokia-owned factories if the project goes well). The ramp-up stage will be done 'sensibly' as opposed to 'the Elop way' haha, so OBVIOUSLY the first Nokia re-entry smartphone will be the new flagship, not how Elop tried on a mid-range phone with the underwhelming Lumia 800. The premium flagship will address a huge pent-up demand of fans of 'real' Nokia not the Lumia Windows Phone rubbish and those buyers will pony up a premium price. Nokia is very smart at marketing, they will know to price the first flagship on a profit-skimming strategy when the demand is big, but also to feed those customers with may 'ooh-aah' features and gorgeous design - just check out the Nokia N1 tablet or the last non-Elop designed smartphones, the MeeGo based N9 and N950.

Nokia knows fully well where the real market is - starting with China (duh!) not the USA - and the first Nokia re-entry flagship will be designed for Emerging World but affluent customers. Expect removable battery, miroSD card slot and all the goodies, of course stuffed full with high tech from NFC to 4G to wireless chargiing to yes, of course the Pureview camera tech. The first Nokia re-entry smartphone flagship is by far the favorite to win the 'phone of year' awards, they've now waited so long to do it 'right'.

Expect the first flagship to be an iPhone-clone in slab form factor, but with Nokia-distinctive design. I would expect it to totally differentiate from Lumia ie not the cheerful neon plastic colors. Something 'serious' and 'expensive' in materials and look and feel. Obviously it will run Android which is total death to the last remnants of the Lumia Windows Phone business at Microsoft. And Sony, Samsung, LG and Lenovo-Motorola better hurry in 2015 to try to build loyalty at the top of the Android pyramid, next year they all will be easily toppled. Nokia's 2016 sales will be limited by capacity to produce and ship not by demand.

Soon after the initial flagship we'll see two sister products. A premium mid-price 'little sister' phone, slightly lesser specs and lower price but still in the premium smartphone segment. And then the follow-up to the iconic Communicator line. Again, something Nokia staff begged Elop to allow but the idiot CEO overrode his staff. Now we'll finally get the flagship-spec QWERTY executive phone, which will be the most advanced phone of its year, like the E90 Communicator, the E7 and the N950. And with a price to match. That phone is likely even to be branded 'Communicator' and it will be a technology showcase of 'everything including the kitchen sink' principle but ignoring the silly race for supermodel-slim phones. This will be the thickest, fattest smartphone we've seen in several years. But we will drool to want it, and will fork over the cash to buy it too. It will be the phone all telecoms bosses will proudly exhibit as the 'better than iPhone' model that all carrier CEO execs want. Who cares what it costs. Nokia prices it obscenely, ships only limited numbers of it, and makes a nice profit on it.

In the first 12 months, Nokia probably only gets to a run-rate of about 25 million smartphones per year, by the fourth quarter since launch (about 6.25 million level at that time or a bit over 1% market share that quarter). But this will continue to grow and be about double that in the second year and reach a run-rate of around 80 million by the third year (2018 and beyond) which is at 4% market share by the 12th quarter of sales. The growth will continue rather easily and Nokia's main issue is to manage profitability and expansion of capacity and by the turn of the decade Nokia will be around 10% market share still growing. But Nokia's 'native' market share without the Windows Phone baggage today is something in the 15% range or Apple iPhone size haha. Now Nokia can't sell 225 million Nokia branded smartphones costing 600 dollars or more (unsubsidised price) but at that kind of levels Nokia's ASP would be somewhere around 150 dollars, but this would be a very profitable fast-growing business, if Nokia wanted it. Nokia selling 225 million smartphones at 150 dollars average sales price means 34 Billion dollars of annual revenues! That is what is for Nokia to take without breaking a sweat.

If Nokia wants to move more slowly, and skim more of the profit, it can. If Nokia wanted to go beyond this, and really drive for number 1 again, passing not just Apple but Samsung - then yes, that is also within reac, once Nokia is back, its distribution is back, its manufacturing, sourcing etc is back. And here - remember, Nokia KNEW this but Elop ignored it and actually worked to harm it - Nokia's huge strength just four years ago was its world-best carrier relationships. Rajeev Suri the new Nokia CEO can easily tell any carrier CEO that Elop the cancer is gone, Windows Phone is gone, and Nokia returns to serving CARRIER NEEDS first. Something Samsung (and now even Google) have failed to do. Note the acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent is perfectly in line with Nokia serving... carrier needs! The market is waiting to be grabbed by Nokia.

The end-user customers never deserted Nokia. In the four most populous continents, Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe, Nokia was the bestselling smartphone in 2010 and still in 2014, Nokia was the bestselling or second-bestselling PHONE. Because of Windows Phone, the distribution channel pushed premium customers to Samsung, Huawei, LG etc. But the customers want Nokia. They keep buying Nokia (even as its now owned by Microsoft). When the 'real' Nokia returns - on Android - the retail channel will love it and the full power of Nokia loyalty will be felt. As long as Nokia then delivers high quality phones, that are essentially bullet-proof (you know the story where the dog ate the Nokia phone and later pooped it out, and that phone still worked...)

The growth path for Nokia smartphone recovery and return is 'easy' and the rate and level for several years will be up to Nokia and Nokia only. Every quarter for at least two years we will hear that the channel wanted more phones than Nokia could deliver. What Nokia always delivered were phones that end-users loved and carriers loved to sell. Nokia's big problems in 2009 and 2010 were DELIVERY issues and slipping schedules (and some software issues, but now Google handles the OS). But most Nokia generations of phones were award-winners year out and year in.

And yeah. Am willing to call it right now before we know ANYTHING official about what or how, Nokia will give us more than one smartphone model, it will grow fast. in the first year Nokia passes Blackberry. In the second year it passes Lumia (if that still exists). By the third year Nokia RETURNS TO THE TOP 10. And every quarter of those first 12 quarters, 36 months, Nokia smartphone business will report a healthy profit.4% markets share is where LG and ZTE are today, or where Lenovo would be without its Motorola acquisition and obviously that is well bigger than Sony Xpera today. This is the minimum level I promise you Nokia will do 'with its hands tied behind its back' and blindfolded haha.

So WELCOME BACK NOKIA. We have missed you and we will cherish you and support you. Now please make sure we fall in love with your first re-entry smartphones in ways like we loved the N93 and N95 and E90 Communicator and N8 and E7 and N9 and 808 Pureview etc.

Mobile Services Business - Don't Forget Voice and Sound: Case of ATEK in Cusco Peru bringing the Gospel to the Quechua World (via mobile)

Last week I had the chance to visit with my friends at the Mobile Ministry Forum (via video link) and in its aftermath I connected with my friend Marty Lange of Wycliffe Bible Translators. Marty had a fabulous story from Peru I just HAVE to share with our readers, in this mad world of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality and Gamification and smartphone apps and GPS and 4G. Lets not forget the basics. As I was reminded last year speaking at Mobile West Africa conference in Nigeria, a lady from Ghana told me that in many African villages there still is plenty of illiteracy, and even my fave story of SMS is 'too advanced' technology. Some people - and there are still 780 million illiterate ADULTS - can't be reached even with that basic tech of SMS. It is quite literally too advanced. So too, by the way is USSD and IVR. If a person can't read they typically are also lacking in numeracy. If you tell them 'press number 3' on the keyboard, they won't know which of the 12 keys on the phone is a 'three' - and they will hang up.

So lets get to Marty's story. This is awesome. In Peru, in the town of Cusco (known for travel to Machu Pichu) they speak the language of Quechua. About 8 million or a third of Peru's population is Quechua and this language is totally unrelated to Spanish, its the evolution of their ancestral culture and language. And of course, Christian missionaries want to bring the Gospel also to this region, inspite of its language and related issues. So there are of course preachers working in the region. And then we have some issues. Printing Bibles? Translating the texts. Teaching all the issues of Christianity in this region. So there is an organization called ATEK - Asociación Tawantinsuyuman Evangelioq K'ancharinanpaq which Marty translated for me to mean roughly "The Association that Shines the Gospel to the Quechua World". Their Facebook page is here if you want to see (or perhaps want to help preserve this cultural group out of your social responsibilty budget?) Cool beans, eh? So where is the mobile part? We're getting to it.

The leader of ATEK, Fredi Quintanilla ran a conference in Cusco attended by 50 ministers from the various churches across the villages in Peru. Oh, and yeah, I know geography isn't our strong suit among my readers so lets clarify how small is Peru by area. Peru is nearly twice as big as TEXAS. Peru is bigger than France and Spain combined. The Andies are yes, the second tallest mountains in the world after the Himalayas, and the border with Brazil has the biggest rain forest of the Amazon. Thats Peru for you. Now lets return to our story.

So this little language group that only about 12 million people speak across the Andies, and 8 million of those in Peru, doesn't exactly have a big opportunity for its literature. And many of the population in the villages are illiterate. So what to do? Fredi and Marty helped create a set of videos to teach some basics of the Gospel and an audio version of the Bible, in the language of Quechua. Beautiful, yes. Now the distribution. Nobody has PCs or broadand internet haha nor even DVD players for this kind of content. But all preachers have a mobile phone. So Marty and Fredi did what any clever geek would do, lets put it on mobile phones! So during the conference they loaded the video and audio files to the phones of their ministers who can now share God's word with their parishes and congregations, in the Quechua language. Simple and easy, but a huge help in spreading the message. And no smartphones or apps or geeky programming needed. Voice. Sound (and video). Simple stuff. See Marty talk about this at his short video.

Quick Posts 4 - Other News in the Smartphone Bloodbath: Samsung, LG, Sony, Xiaomi

Then lets do some other short news items as the Q1 financial results season is upon us and we'll start to see smartphone Bloodbath results coming in.

Samsung yes the S6 and Edge seem to have had a strong initial reception. But as I warned, there were serious design flaws that will turn away some LOYAL Samsung owners, with abandoning the waterproofing, removable battery and MicroSD in the S6 series that the S5 used to have. Some early news suggest that LG and Sony Xperia are seeing good periods but the S6 has barely started to ship. What we did get, was the first sign of real trouble at the mill. News from South Korea, Samsung's home market report that actual end-user sales are severely below the enthusiastic early orders by retail channels (exactly as I warned). Here is the story as reported by Mobile Burn which reports that actual sales are only 67% of the level of the pre-orders (but the article does not quote any analyst sources for their data). 

Oh, an interesting tidbit from Japan. Samsung the brand is so much seen as a 'discount' brand in Japan, ie inferior to any Japanese domestic brands, that Samsung has now removed the Samsung name from its new Galaxy phones sold in Japan and markets them only as Galaxy. Haha. Interesting. Are the Japanese so gullible they'd think Galaxy is not Korean and somehow think it is Japanese?

LG has teased its flagship the G4 and tellingly, is raising its price above that of the S6. If its a better phone, why not charge a higher price. LG has been profitable past several quarters and getting its mojo back. So yeah, as I've argued on this blog for quite a while, there is plenty of pricing space above the imaginary iCeiling of 600 dollars unsubsidised price. LG is now going there. Good for them. I am expecting a couple of good quarters for the LIfe's Good guys.

Meanwhile the other Galaxy-beater is of course Sony Xperia Z4. Would they abandon waterproofing or microSD card slot as some feared, right as the opportunity arose with Samsung's silly design changes? No. The Xperia Z4 is a very mild, mostly internal specs upgrade vs the Z3 but yes, critically, it keeps waterproofing and the microSD slot. Also - as I suggested they should do - they are raising hte price of their flagship. So next two or three quarters, Sony should see some healthy numbers with their Xperia unit. And if LG and Xperia find growth in Android flagship buyers, that is the market outside of China and the victim will have been .. Galaxy. Mark my words, the S6 decision to abandon waterproofing, removable battery and microSD slot will be seen as an 'obvious' mistake that Samsung will correct soon - they are smart people in Gangnam and nobody reacts as fast as the Koreans. Balli-balli.

Xiaomi sales have now stopped explosive growth (as I predicted, it was a spike of the latest cool thing). It can't grow at those rates abroad as Xiaomi tries to quickly move internationally. Nothing new here to our readers but how many other 'experts' who were so GaGa about Xiaomi only a few months ago, are tellng you this. The biggest smartphone maker is Samsung. Apple is number 2. Lenovo is number 3. Huawei is number 4. Xiaomi is not 'the new Apple' and achieving rocketship level growth. They'll be lucky to retain position number 5 through this year and may well tumble further into the pack.

Then Huawei. They have an aggressive goal to become the third biggest smartphone maker (to pass Lenovo which owns Motorola). That would be plausible yes, except Huawei also said they will now focus on the high premium phone segment and mid-price smartphones and not focus on the lowest-cost smartphones where the big growth is. Well, say goodbye to number 3 aspirations if that is your plan. You can't grow faster than competitors if you don't address the biggest growth area of the industry. I think Huawei just signalled its white flag that it abandons the number 3 race to Lenovo.

Ok, thats whats on my mind today. Lets have the chat by my readers focused on the individual blog which relates to that brand, ok?

Quick Posts 3 - Google Fi is a DANGEROUS Move by the 'Do No Evil' Guys

Next up, Google. So yeah, we've been seeing the rumors for a long while about a Google MVNO and it became gradually confirmed. But now its launched and wow? This really is a dangerous move by Google that is likely to greatly anger the carrier community.

What is Google Fi? Its the MVNO that Google sets up in the USA, where people can buy a Google contract to have voice, messaging, data etc for a set data limit per month, costing 30 US dollars to start with. You can buy more data capacity and Google will refund any unused data (typically by rolling it into the next month's fee). So Google buys airtime wholesale from the big US carriers and then resells that. Nothing bizarre in that as a business, Virgin Mobile has made a successful business out of that idea in countless countries from Britain to Canada to Australia (I think their only failure as an MVNO was in Singapore) But here's the rub. Google with Android is a supplier of tech for carriers. Android powers over 80% of all smartphones sold, and this Quarter (April-June) that means about 56% of all phones sold worldwide, smart or dumb, powered by Android. Most of those phones are sold in carrier stores and the vast majority of whats left are by major chains of retailers who won't want to sell phones that the carreirs don't support.

Android reaches 1.5 Billion pockets today. Thats bigger in reach than Facebook (and growing FASTER than Facebook, yes thats true). Why would Google now threaten this amazing growth engine.by angering its retail channel? For a few lousy pennies they can make in the MVNO business as a late entrant on razor-thin margins? What is wrong with them? The VAST opportunity in mobile is the CONSUMER DATA opportunity, the holy grail of tech. And Google has just last year become the single biggest player in mobile, having access to more consumers than the largest telecoms carrier/operator (China Mobile). Why now play with this deadly fire? I really think this will turn out to be a bad move by Google.

So the Google Fi service is one that hunts for WiFi hotspots and migrates the traffic to WiFi whenever a suitable network is within range. Now thats nice, isn't it. Google is a supplier of the telecoms carriers, and now enabling a bypassing network arrangement where (increasingly) part of the traffic is bypassing the carriers altogether! Paying them nothing for this part. Let me feed you poison, but I'll put in some sweet strwawberries in here so it doesn't taste as bad. This is the same poisoned deal Microsoft was peddling with Skype back in 2011 to the carriers who all turned it down immediately. What is going on now?

Part of Google's calculation is the 'I am truly evil but I claim to do no evil' ploy. They played nice until they became too big to stop. Now that Symbian is dead, Maemo is dead, Limo is dead, MeeGo is dead. Windows Mobile is dead (the old Microsoft platform, not Windows Phone). bada is dead. And Windows Phone while pretending to be alive - is dead. Blackberry is good for dead. And Tizen, Firefox, Mozilla, Sailfish are way way too tiny to matter. So its only the iPhone and iOS is 'worse' with iMessage etc not giving the carriers a penny.

So now, the carriers will never go from the slow poison of Android and Google Fi to the fast poison of Windows Phone with Skype. That won't happen. Theoretically Blackberry has an opening here claiming they are the least dangerous of the smartphone OS platforms, and their data algorithms DO save in some internet web traffic so carriers actually see less load on a network accessing the same web pages on a Blackberry than on an iPhone, Android or other smartphone. But they still have BBM so they're still also a threat, but the least of this bad bunch. And besides, Blackberry's phones are horrid right now, nothing nearly competitive so there's little hope they could in any way replace Android.

So the window opens for Tizen and Firefox (and the rest of the minnows). If Samsung can roll out rapidly a series of competitive Tizen devices, across all price points - and if Samsung promise with written contracts to carriers that Tizen will not include any native free messaging or VOIP services, and Samsung won't launch as MVNO anywhere - this could be the come-back for Tizen after several failed attempts to launch.

Same goes for Firefox. If I was running Tizen or Firefox, I'd go out of my way to get the word into the public domain by all our handset partners etc, that there is no MVNO threat here, no Skype threat here, no iMessage or other such threat here. That my OS (Firefox or Tizen) is the friendliest OS there is, and carriers should prioritize this one instead of the parasites they see in Windows Phone, Android, iOS and Blackberry.

I honesty didn't expect Google to take this path. I do think this is a mistake. Google does learn fast, however, and they may well soon repent and change. Remember they made a similar mistake with the original launch of the Nexus as a Google-manufactured smartphone on Android. That did not go well with their handset partners, they didn't want Google as a direct competitor. So G soon fixed that, by licencing the Nexus product brand individually by Andorid OS generation to a different handset maker every cycle, as a 'reference phone' or premium phone. So LG would do a Nexus, then Motorola would do another Nexux, then HTC would do a Nexus model, etc. We might see the MVNO Google Fi project soon transform itself into something less threatening to the carrier community. If that happens. the only driver of that change was hostilty by the carrier community to Google Fi.

Separarely as a consumer and thinking of the US market alone, gosh, that is such a consumer-hostile market by arrogant US carriers, they certainly need several kicks in their asses, and Google Fi is good for the US consumer. But globally, I think this was a very bad miscalculation by Google and carriers worldwide are quite unhappy with the 'Do No Evil' boys from Mountain View.

Ok, thats Google, now lets see what else is happening in tech right now..

Quick Posts 2 - Microsoft Results Show Worsening Misery at Lumia Unit - Market Share All-Time Record Low: Now only 2.3%

Continuing the quick posts about recent news in mobile & tech. Now up, Microsoft Quarterly results and the ongoing trainwreck at Lumia smartphone unit (still run by the most incompetent executive in mobile: Stephen Elop. For how man more weeks or months, who knows but Nadella is gonna remove this guy soon).

So Microsoft reports 8.6 Million smartphones sold in calendar Q1 of 2015. That is down 18% from Q4 when the Lumia unit managed to sell a sad 10.5M units, and its worst Christmas market share in Nokia-Microsoft smartphone history of 2.8%. The past worst bottom market share Nokia-Microsoft smartphone unit aka Lumia had ever reported since Nokia invented the smartphone, was 2.5%. Now the latest quarter sets a new low at 2.3%. The Lumia unit is literally dying before our eyes.

This is the history: Nokia smartphone market share evolution since Stephen Elop was in full charge:

Q4 2010 - 29% (on Symbian and Maemo, profitable and profits growing strongly)

Q1 2011 - 24% (announced switch to Windows)
Q2 2011 - 15% (unprofitable)
Q3 2011 - 14% (MeeGo released alongside Symbian, but unit still unprofitable)
Q4 2011 - 12% (Lumia lilmited release on Windows alongside Symbian and MeeGo, unit still unprofitable)

Q1 2012 - 8.1% (first quarter Lumia sold broadly, unit still unprofitable)
Q2 2012 - 6.7% (unprofitable)
Q3 2012 - 3.6% (Microsoft announces early Nokia Lumia handsets cannot be upgraded to Windows Phone 8, unit reports crippling levels of losses)
Q4 2012 - 3.0% (first Windows Phone 8 smartphones start to ship, unit still unprofitable)

Q1 2013 - 2.9% (unprofitable)
Q2 2013 - 3.2% (unprofitable)
Q3 2013 - 3.5% (Microsoft and Nokia announce sale of total handset business to Microsoft, unit is still unprofitable)
Q4 2013 - 2.9% (unprofitable)

Q1 2014 - 2.5% (unprofitable)
Q2 2014 - 2.6% (Nokia handset unit shifted to Microsoft control, unit is still unprofitable)
Q3 2014 - 2.8% (unprofitable)
Q4 2014 - 2.9% (Microsoft reveals that of all Lumia handsets shipped - and included in the above reported numbers - one in three has not been activated, so the performance literally has been 1/3 worse than even this table of misery indicates. Unit.. is still unprofitable)

Q1 2015 - 2.3% (unprofitable)

That is misery, my dear friends and readers and haters and Microsoft-lovers. The Nokia smartphone unit that reported bigger growth in unit sales in 2010 than the iPhone - yes Nokia was pulling away from the iPhone, not that Apple was catching up to Nokia from 2009 to 2010 and yes, Nokia was doing this with growing profits when Elop took charge, setting a Nokia record for profits out of its smartphone unit in Q4 of 2010. Nokia had over 50% market share in the four large continents by population and only the two smallest continents by population, North America and Australia did Nokia have a lesser position. In China, the world's largest smartphone market, Nokia had a market share of over 70% in 2010 and strong customer loyalty.

Then came Stephen Elop who wrecked all that. He exchanged a growing profitable business that has 29% global market share - and was literally more than twice as big as its nearest rival !!! (such a dominating position that Coca Cola or GM or Toyota has NEVER had). And just four years later, that very same unit, still run by the same moron Stephen Elop the worst CEO of economic history of humankind (now only a Vice President at Microsoft) has 2.3% market share (and one third of those shipments are not even activated). I have told you this is a patient that has died. If you wanted to know why and how, I told you exactly once again, last year, when the Microsoft acquisition of this unit was completed. I explained why this unit is dead and why it cannot be revived. So here we are again. The share of Lumia is only going down, now setting a new low for the once-proud Nokia smartphone unit, 2.3% market share. Incidentially Blackberry had as huge a market share as 2.3% just 18 months ago. This is a dead 'ecosystem' that nobody supports, the app developers are abandoning and Nokia is headed into that same toilet where Blackberry now sits. (Last BB market share was 0.5% haha)

As the unit struggles and shrinks and loses relevance and can't hold any customers or markets, that means also obviously more layoffs in the unit. I know we've already seen two sets of layoffs in less than 12 months since Microsoft took over the business, but this misery suggests that more is to come. Brace yourself...

If Lumia market share is 2.3% then total Windows Phone market share is now far below 3.0% also the lowest level since the original launch of Microsoft smartphone software more than a decade ago which one did peak at 12% market share. Nobody takes seriously any claims by Microsoft that there is - or can be - a recovery from this market failure.

Windows 10 will not rescue Lumia. The Nokia N1 tablet on Android is already damaging Lumia - in particular in China - and the moment Nokia announces its first Android smartphone, that is the final nail into the coffin of the smartphone dream at Microsoft. Nadella should shut down this loss-making disaster (or sell it to anyone for whatever price he can get). Oh, and fire that moron Elop.

More short stories in just a moment...

Quick posts 1: Nokia Acquires Alcatel-Lucent

I've been busily traveling but there are several developments that I know my readers would like my comments at least briefly, and also a place where they can then chat about it, by topic. So I'm posting a few short(ish) blog stories today about recent news past weeks and my brief comments. First up, Nokia purchase of Alcatel-Lucent.

If we look at the telecoms infrastructure world of 2001 just as I left Nokia, the seven big players in the industry were in order of their annual network equipment sales: Ericsson, Lucent, Nokia, Siemens, Nortel, Motorola and Alcatel. Nokia itself had in very rough terms a half-way split in it business between the fast-growing handset business and the more mature telecoms infrastructure business, about one third of Nokia total employees were with handsets, revenues were essentially split 50/50 and profits came 2/3 from handsets and only one third from networks. Early in my independent consulting career I remarked often that the telecoms infra market had too many players and we would be seeing consolidation as the big 3G related growth stage passed.

And so it was, Nokia got into a joint venture with Siemens, eventually acquiring that networking business. Alcatel bought Lucent. Ericsson acquired most of the assets of Nortel piece-meal. Nokia bought the Motorola networking business that had gone bankrupt and thus those seven were down to three. Now with the Alcatel-Lucent acquisition, Nokia brings that set down to two, and one wonders will some day come when Nokia would then acquire the Swedish based Ericsson or do some merger there. Now, in the interim, two strong Chinese networking equipment providers have emerged, of course, Huawei the larger and ZTE the smaller of those two. Huawei is about the size of Ericsson or the new Nokia-Alcatel-Lucent.

So now Nokia is essentially the networking businesses combined of Nokia-Siemens-Motorola-Alcatel-Lucent. And by that score, Ericsson is combined Ericsson-Nortel. Just a fascinating observation of free market dynamics at work.

Three quick observations here. First, remember my 'dream scenario' of Nokia re-acquiring the handset business back from Microsoft? Or the equally wild Sony Xperia unit? Those were quite wild ideas, but now, clearly, at least Nokia had been in the market to spend some of its cash and clearly wanted to acquire something. I'm also pretty sure that they probably won't buy anything else for now, as they now prefer to focus on making the Alcatel-Lucent acquisition work (like they turned around the loss-making businesses of Siemens networking and Motorola networking before). 

Secondly, there are still rumors Nokia wants to divest the Here mapping and location-based services business. I told you right from the start, when then-CEO Stephen Elop announced his passion for Here and maps, that it was a losing proposition, and rather obviously now it can be seen, that it also was. So yeah, they will probably unload that hopeless mess to some unsuspecting victim from the West Coast who still believes in maps and location haha.

Lastly Nokia handset return? There are increasing rumors that such a project is indeed under way, obviously on Android. The first Android based N1 tablet has been quite successful in China, a market that greatly loved/loves the Nokia brand and was so poorly served by the Windows Lumia experiment. Expect Android Nokia smartphones to be tailored to fit Chinese needs particularly well and probably aim more for high-end than low-end initially.

So lets next talk about the misery at Microsoft's Lumia division..

Reviewing My Last 4 Year Forecast Blog (3 Years In) from 2012

So as I released the TomiAhonen Mobile Forecast 2014-2018 last week and celebrated that with new forecasts of upcoming milestones, now is a good time to look back at my past forecasts (and who dares do that in mobile forecasting haha?)

ITS EASY TO MAKE FORECASTS, ITS NOT EASY BEING ACCURATE

So yeah. Just for context some of the wild forecasts promised in 2012 by some of my esteemed peers in the forecasting racket. Did you see any of these return to how accurate their forecast was and why it went wrong? in 2012 iHS iSupply promised us Windows Phone would zoom up to 15% market share (reality? stayed at 3%. 5-fold error). Abi forecasted in 2012 that smartphone unit sales would pass dumbphones in four years in 2016 (reality was the very next year 2013, so error was 4x). In 2012 Ovum told us iPhone would grow global market share and reach 27% by 2017. Well it didn't grow its been falling and is now at 15%. Maybe Ovum turns out still correct but highly unlikely. As it now stands, they are off 80%. Credit Suisse told us in 2012 that global smartphone sales would hit the 1B level in 2015 (reality this year will be 1.5B, so an error of 50%). Forrester told us in 2012 that smartphone apps would be worth 56 Billion dollars this year 2015 (reality will be about half). Research & Markets forecasted in 2012 that the global smartphone market would be worth 218 Billion dollars this year 2015. Reality is nearly twice that at about $400B (so error of say 83%). Gartner in 2012 promised that Windows Phone would pass iOS to become second biggest smartphone OS in 2015. Apple has 15%, Microsoft has 3%, thats a 5-fold error. In 2012 Morgan Stanley forecasted for us that Nokia would sell 80 million smartphones in 2013. They sold 30.5 million (error 162%). IDC in 2012 promised us that year 2016 would see Android OS pass Windows on all new digital devices sold. It actually happened the next year 2013 (so it was an error by a factor of 4).

I could go on, but you get my point. Its not easy being in the forecasting business, we all get it wrong from time to time, and sometimes we make big booboos. But most of my 'peers' do not bother to come back and remind you about how their past forecasts were, nor to try to examine why that forecast went wrong. Now, I would be remiss, in discussing errors in mobile industry forecasts, if I didn't remind the readers of the worst forecast of the mobile industry in this century so far, that by the utterly incompetent Pyramid and their lunatic 'expert' Stela Bokun the biggest fraudster in the mobile stats and facts industry (whatever happened to Stela Bokun, worst creep of this difficult industry). So yes, that was a forecast made in 2011, but they promised the world that WIndows Phone would grow past Android by 2013 (which tells us a lot about who must have been paying Pyramid for this garbage) and a 'forecast' based on utterly imaginary starting points where their base year numbers were off at the extreme by 120% (yes, that would be 120% error somehow magically in favor of Microsoft. Yes its the Microsoft Bullshit Brigade again at work with their propaganda here). Pyramid was widely ridiculed for that worst forecast of the industry and for the record in 2013 Android sold 767 million units of smartphones and Windows Phone managed 33 million. That error is as far as I know the biggest error in any forecast in mobile ever made, at 2,200 percent !!! in a very short term forecast period covering only 2 years !!!!!!!!!  Yeah Pyramid, you should be ashamed of yourself and nobody reading my blog should ever ever buy another Pyramid forecast or report for anything in or near mobile or tech .Shame! (But I told you so at the time that it was an epic ridiculous disaster of a forecast. As I wrote in 2011 about Pyramid's forecast: "That is patently false. It is a lie. Pyramid Research are lying to its customers. They are not just incompetent, they are liers!" If you want a good laugh, go read the original blog). But yeah, we know Microsoft try to buy good news, probably some money exchanged hands on this outrageous, ridiculous, fantastical and utterly unbelievable 'forecast' that was instantly lambasted by the industry. Two THOUSAND and 200 percent error in a two-year forecast.

SO HOW IS THE T-DAWG?

Ok, after that little bit of context to remind readers nobody is ever perfect in forecasting, lets go to my 2012 blog forecasting big milestones to come in mobile. In that blog I made 10 milestone forecasts (what moment is passed in that given year) through years 2013 to 2015. Obviously the 2015 forecasts cannot be evaluated yet but we have 8 items we can examine. Here we do arrive at a problem, however. Many of those forecasted data points are a bit difficult to verify from 'independent' sources as some of those are statistics that only TomiAhonen Consulting even reports into the public domain. So its not exactly fair for me to claim that my company has verified this number haha.. Lets see which of the 8 forecasts DO have some independent number and what can we tell from that.

First off the easy ones. I said in 2012 that in year 2013 the world will see 1 Billion smartphones sold. And we do have the count, it wasn't quite that. The average of the big analyst houses reporting that statistic gave us the annual count at 990 million. I was wrong. I was off by 1% on this, one of the most seismic statistics for the industry. I'll take that. 1% error is as good as perfect.

Then I forecasted in 2012 that year 2014 the world will see total handset sales hit 2 Billion units. Here I was more off. According to Gartner, the total was only 1.88 Billion so I was off by 6%. Thats ok but not exactly spot-on. I personally happen to think the actual number was more than 1.88 - as Gartner is very conservative in their numbers but I also do agree it wasn't 2B last year, so fair enough. I was off by 6%.

Then I forecasted in 2012 that the total number of SMS active users would exceed human population by 2014. Here I was quite a bit off. SMS active user counts are rarely reported but we do have a global count by Acision from 2013 which was 6 Billion. And now an analysis of the numbers based on Pew global survey of Emerging World mobile users, and adding rich world numbers to that, gives an SMS text messaging active user base at about 5.6 Billion in 2014. My own consultancy also agrees it was under 6 Billion, I counted it at 5.8B. So if we ignore my number and take the average of those two, ie 5.8 Billion, that is still way off from the human population at 7.2 Billion last year. That is an error of 19%. That is quite a lof of error and I do apologize. What have I learned? SMS user growth stalled just about when I posted that forecast, with the rapid adoption of Whatsapp. But because most OTT messaging users also continue to use SMS occasionally, even that doesn't explain the full matter of the stalling of SMS user growth. I think we've just hit the natural limits that come from literacy and the use of the same services across multiple accounts. Many people might have two or three accounts where one is optimized for SMS (with say an unlimited SMS bundle) and therefore that user won't bother to use the other account(s) for SMS while using them for say voice or internet browsing or whatnot. Still yes, I was off by 19% on this count. That being said, SMS is still by far the most used data application on the planet, not just on mobile. SMS is also the most used feature on mobile phones far ahead of voice, camera and clock. And SMS dwarfs all other messaging platforms like MMS, email, OTT instant messaging etc. By branded platforms SMS is four and a half times bigger than Facebook by active users and obviously 8 times bigger than Whatsapp (by active users, the traffic generated by that small passionate user base of Whatsapp is far more than SMS users naturally).

I said in 2012 that half of all new phones sold in 2014 will have touch screens. That was a rather easy one as global smartphone sales went from 990 million to 1.3 Billion into 2014 and nearly all smartphones have touch screens. So this was a 100% accurate forecast (while not necessarily very 'bold' one haha).

So that was the four easy numbers to verify. I also made four other forecasts that we can't easily prove to be absolutely true but have at least some signs of were a couple in the ballpark or not. 

I forecasted in 2012 that by end of year 2013, one third of all phones in use worldwide would have WiFi ability. I have tried to find an independent count of that number to no avail. Lots of stats about WiFi radio shipments or WiFi traffic but no count of WiFi mobile phones either installed base or new sales. BUT, we do have a close proxy. Back in 2013 most recently-sold smartphones (but not quite all) had WiFi and also some high-end 'featurephones' like Nokia Asha series had WiFi. We can thus take as a close estimate the total count of WiFi as the proxy for WiFi enabled devices (today that is ever less accurately so, as ever cheaper basic smartphones are sold that don't include WiFi). So in 2013, what was the final count of smartphones in use? 1.6 Billion according to this blog, the only site that reports installed base of smartphones globally. And of all phones in use in 2013? That was according to the TomiAhonen Almanac 2014, 3.9 Billion phones. 41% is roughly the number. That was under one third in 2012 so yeah, this is pretty solidly 'likely true' number and date.

But then the internet user forecast. I said in 2012 that in year 2014 half of internet users never use a PC and only use a moblle. For this again, there are not easy numbers. The ITU which is often quoted, only gives 'broadband' mobile internet count on 3G and faster, so they ignore much of say African and Indian mobile internet use on slower networks running 2.5G like GPRS and EDGE. Another popular way to count mobile internet users is smartphone users, but that ignores dumbphones and many of the mid-price dumbphones have full HTML browsers such as the Asha line of Nokia featurephones. And beyond that, yes there is still WAP, the simple mobile-optimized subset of HTML that was the early mobile internet and is still a significant part of internet use in Africa and poor parts of the world. But what we do know that in 2014 the total internet user count passed 3 Billion. If I was to be right, 1.5 Billion should never use a PC. Meanwhile the PC population passed 1.5 Billion and most definitely many who own a PC and a smartphone use both to access the internet, so I was definitely wrong. But this is a difficult number to pin down. There is a reported number by IAB that says 1 Billion internet users will be mobile only, and that is a 2015 number for 2015. Sounds pretty solid except it is only for 'mobile broadband' ie 3G and faster use. Definitely mobile internet user base is signficantly larger when 2.5G and WAP are added but how big? I don't have a number for you out of any published source other than my own. But I will grant you, in 2014, we did not reach the point where half of internet users acccess via mobile-only. Maybe that number was about 1.2B out of 3B so I was off by about 25%. But like I said, this is a number very hard to pin down.

Then there were two numbers we really don't have a good verification for. The camera use ahead of voice calls. Its an inevitable trend. The UK has for example already passed that but is the global number there yet? We don't get enough cameraphone user global stats reported to give that count accurately.

Same goes for TV voting stats. It used to be more widely reported but recently we haven't seen those numbers anymore. Likely yes, considering how well premium SMS revenues keep growing and the popularity of various vote-to-TV show formats like American Idol continue but I don't have any recent number to report to verify. So these two last items we have to leave as unverifyable (as of now).

AND THE VERDICT IS

So the final count. Of 10 forecasted mileposts, 8 have passed. For 6 of those we can determine precisely or at least approximately if they were accurate. On three I was solidly on, excellent forecasts (smartphone sales 2013, touch screens 2014 and WiFi mobile use 2013). On the total handset sales 2014 forecast I was off a bit more with error of 6% but still good. And on two forecasts I was off far more, with SMS users 19% and with mobile-only internet users 25%. Four good or excellent calls out of six, two somewhat off calls but still in the right direction. No really booboo calls here, off by 50% or 100% or 400% or gosh, 2,200% haha... (yeah, I still got it..)

Thats what the most accurate forecaster does for you, here on this blog, all the time. Nobody is perfect in forecasting, that is literally impossble. But somebody has gotta be the most accurate in this business, and that is still me. And if you need more numbers, my brand new TomiAhonen Mobile Forecast 2014-2018 is out. Some highlights of the forecast are again free in this blog article.

Next Four Years in Mobile - Highlights from my brand new forecast

The world is going mobile-first. Apple is the most profitable company in the history of humankind, and is so only because they shifted away from PCs to mobile. Starbucks says mobile is more important to the company's future than coffee beans or location. Yahoo follows Google and Facebook declaring mobile is how they intend to make their profits. NBA the basketball association now says they are 'mobile first'. From hotels to airlines to media, advertising, banking and retail, even government, healthcare and education are all mad about mobile. Mobile is obviously the thing to do.

However, once you get past the initial iSyndrome (Martin Wilson's smart observation that creating an iPhone App is not a substitute for a mobile strategy) what do you do? How many have smartphones vs 'dumbphones'? How many of the 3 Billion global 'internet users' are already on mobile? How much larger is the mobile internet user base than say, the number of people downloading smartphone apps. How much bigger is the reach of MMS than email or Facebook or Whatsapp. And exactly how huge is the reach of the only gorilla in the room, SMS text messaging? Yes you came to the right place. Lets look at the next four years in the mobile industry.

For those who don't know me, welcome to my blog. I am the most accurate forecaster of this industry, the father of many of the statistics and metrics of mobile and this blog is the largest collection of public source statistics and facts about the mobile industry. I have written 12 books for the mobile industry including the book on how this industry makes its money (yes, literally, I wrote 'the' book: m-Profits, global bestseller in 2002). I have a passion for sharing data and stats about this industry both here on this blog that has passed 5 million visitors lifetime (and still no ads! and no registration! and I will not spam you) and at my Twitter feed I have already 14,000 following me. Perhaps the biggest indicator of how I am seen is that 140 books by my peers already quote me in just 13 years from my first book. No wonder Forbes called me the most influential expert in mobile. And yes, now its a time to look at my 'big' comprehensive forecast into the next four years in this industry.

MY BIG FORECAST IS OUT

So yes, three years ago I released a major forecast that was widely references and very well received. Back then I also made a 'highlights' blog entry about major mileposts coming in the next few years. You can go read that blog if you want, I will of course return to that and revisit those forecasts from three years ago, to see how well they compared to the reality. Am I still the most accurate forecaster of this industry? (My regular readers know already...). But yes, this is now the occasion to celebrate the launch of the Tomi Ahonen Mobile Forecast 2014-2018. The next four years in this magnificent industry, the fastest--growing giant industry the planet has ever seen that went from zero to 1 Trillion dollars of annual revenues in only 29 years (most other tech industries never grew to be that big, such as television, personal computers, the internet, etc). So lets take a look at some of the milestones now coming. I have divided this blog into a group of the next 4 years, by year.

MILESTONES COMING IN 2015

This year sees several big milestones we will pass. The mobile handset industry will have its first ever year selling 2 Billion mobile phones (most of them are now smartphones). No consumer tech has ever had that kind of sales levels, not TVs, not PCs, not gaming consoles, not digital cameras, not FM radios, etc. Two Billion sold per year. Thats 5 million phones sold every single day of every week, Saturdays and Sundays included, all the way through all holidays. Thats this industry!

Talking about those handsets and the older PC industry. This year sees the installed base of Android based smartphones grow past 2 Billion in use. Thats more yes than all personal computers including tablets, on all operating systems they use (mostly Windows obviously). This year sees the overall handset (dumbphone and smartphone) installed base pass the level where half are operated by touch-screen (as many 'featurephones' are also touch-screen operated like the Nokia Asha series of featurephones/dumbphones).

And if you are into the smartphone apps industry (mostly a barren desert where if you don't do games, you really won't make much money) then yes, this year we pass the level where 2 Billion people download apps to smartphones. That may seem like a big number until you understand the full mobile industry. Its far smaller than say mobile internet users or cameraphone users or MMS users or gosh, SMS text messaging users. But yeah, nice number, 2 Billion, why not. (for those not knowing the math behind apps, yes its a hopeless barren desert for anyone who isn't a game developer and game developers of course only have a 1 in 10 chance of succeeding. Large user numbers is not much money in apps).

MILESTONES COMING IN 2016

Next up: next year. By 2016 we will see more milestones. For example 3 Billion people will be using mobile search. Yeah. Today there are exactly 3 Billion internet users (and not all of them use search). But by the end of next year, just search users, on mobile, will pass the 3 Billion level. And you doubted Google's interest in mobile, haha.. Its like I teach in my workshops around the world, The Truth Is In The Pocket. At the end of next year 50% of all phones in use on the planet are smartphones.

The balance of SMS text messaging revenues reaches the tipping point, as person-to-person messaging keeps shifting to 'OTT' service providers like Whatsapp, in 2016, half of total SMS revenues worldwide will come from 'premium SMS' ie A2P and P2A (Application to Person, and vice versa) services. What do I mean? Vote for American Idol on TV, get a security code on a web service, pay for a drink on a vending machine, get an airline boarding pass, open a public pay toilet door, get a bus ticket, send a donation to a charity, make a payment, etc etc etc. Oh, and advertising of course, coupons and offers. Premium SMS. Yes, its already twice as big as 'smartphone apps' today and by 2016 premium SMS will be more than half of total SMS revenues globally. And meanwhile back to those phones, the cameraphone active user base hits 5 Billion next year. Yeah, death to the stand-alone camera business.... (BTW the only place on the planet that gives cameraphone and digital camera stats and digital photography stats is my blog, here)

MORE MILESTONES IN 2017

So lets move to 2017. What do we see there? Smartphone sales hit 2 Billion units per year. Yes. Smartphones. Two billion. And PCs only sell about 500 million per year (if tablets like the iPad are included) or 300 million (if tablets are not included). Both PC and tablet sales have stopped growing in any meaningful way, are essentially flat from now on. But smartphone sales, well, they were 1 Billion in 2013 (990 million actually). And will be double that just four years later, in 2017. What a lovely industry if numbers here double every four years haha...

What do we do with our mobiles then? Well, 2017 becomes the first year when mobile 'data' revenues exceed mobile voice revenues globally. Thats a nice shift for us and opens massive opportunities. Talking of those massive opportunities, OTT and SMS. 2017 is the year when OTT instant messaging platforms reach a total user base of 2.7 Billion. Obviously that is not Whatsapp which will be a part of that only. That number, 2.7 Billion again may sound big but in the context of mobile messaging, it really isn't. It is only the half-way point to SMS active user base in 2017 (which will be down a bit from its peak, and be 5.4 Billion active SMS text messaging users in 2017). And to be very clear, Whatsapp today is the most used OTT instant messaging platform that has 700 million users. It is only 1/8 the size of the active user base of SMS text messaging today at 5.6 Billion. Or to put it another way, if you take the total user base of the biggest OTT provider in messaging, Whatsapp, then SMS is merely 8 times larger today. By 2017, maybe SMS will by then only be about 3 or 4 times bigger...

And one more user behavior bit. Internet. Most internet users today access the internet part of the time on a PC (or tablet) and part of the time on a mobile phone (usually smartphone). By 2017, half of the total global internet user base never uses a PC, and accesses the internet only on a mobile. Can you see now why all the majors of the industry are preaching 'mobile first' strategies?

MILESTONES COMING IN 2018

So finally the last year of the Forecast period. What can we look forward to in 2018? The year brings a big milestone for WiFi, as half of all phones in use that year will support WiFi. The average sales price of smartphones falls below 200 dollars in 2018 for the first time ever (with plenty of cheap basic smartphones selling for under 50 dollars but of course also premium smartphones like the iPhones and Galaxies and Xperias will sell in the near 1,000 dollar price levels, so the average is just below 200 dollars, as far more of the cheap phones sell than the very expensive ones).

Android reaches 3 Billion active users just on smartphones (and plenty more on tablets and ultrabooks etc). And of that OS war, I predict in 2018 the market share of new smartphones sold will be Android 82%, iOS is second with 10% and Tizen third with 4%. Firefox has a tiny slice as does Blackberry. Windows if not dead is essentially dead for all practical purposes in smartphones (but Windows of course still holds a big slice of the far smaller PC market even then).

Thats a highlights preview of the next four years. All data in this blog may be freely quoted and used, please list the source as: TomiAhonen Mobile Forecast 2014-2018 and if you can, please do include a link to this blog for more info.. As I said, this is a blog to celebrate my new Forecast just out today. I will return to review the previous Forecast and the mileposts it predicted, how close we got last time. And now about the document itself. The Tomi Ahonen Mobile Forecast 2014-2018 is of course a paid forecast but not one that costs thousands of dollars. As the most accurate forecaster of the industry, I could certainly price it in that kind of range like many of my peers but rather, I am perfectly happy to sell that at 99 Euros as an eBook and great value to my readers and fans. The Forecast is formatted for the smartphone screen so you can carry the pdf ebook in your pocket at all times and have the major numbers of the industry at your fingertips at all times. If you are involved in mobile, no other document is more valuable to you, than the best map to the near future and as such, a 99 Euro price is a modest price to pay so you won't be fooled again into thinking Windows Phone can get 20% market share or smartphone apps will be worth 90 Billion dollars or the other rubbish that charlatans in this industry have been peddling.

So the TomiAhonen Mobile Forecast 2014-2018 has 100 pages of stats and facts and numbers and charts. It makes 109 separate forecasts with 420 individual data points for the years 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018. There are also five scenarios and five annual snapshots (each with 20 main data points of the most relevant data per year). A full table of contents is visible at the website for the TomiAhonen Mobile Forecast 2014-2018. If you do need numbers for this industry, this is the place where to start.

TABLE OF CONTENTS for TOMIAHONEN MOBILE FORECAST 2014-2018

SIZE OF THE INDUSTRY

 - Mobile subscriptions, unique subscribers, second and third subscriptions

 - Handsets ('terminals') in use actual

 - Mobile industry revenues including voice, messaging and VAS/non-messaging data

 - Hardware revenues

CUSTOMERS

 - Penetration rate per capita, as unique users, and among humans alive over age 10

 - Regional subscribers (for each, Total, Unique and Multiple subs) for 8 regions - North America, West Europe, East Europe, Asia-Pacific Advanced, Asia Developing, Middle East, Africa, and Latin America

 - Active base users: Clock and Alarm, Camera, SMS, Advertising, Voice calls, Web Surfing, OTT IM, TV voting, News & Alerts, Search, Downloading, MMS

HANDSETS OVERALL

 - New handset sales in units, smartphones in units, migration rate

 - Smartphones in use & migration rate

 - Installed base of handsets by ability: MMS capability, Bluetooth, Media player, Camera, Memory card slot, HTML browser, 3G, Java/Brew, WiFi, used handsets (second hand handsets), touch screen

 - Average camera resulution

 - Input method Touch Screen, QWERTY, hybrid and basic

HANDSET MARKET SHARES

 - Market shares of new sales: All handsets, dumbphones, smartphones

 - Smartphone OS Forecast Base Case and 5 scenarios (Tizen upside, Tizen death, Apple expands to lower prices, Blackberry recovery, Microsoft return)

 - Regional OS market shares for 8 regions - North America, West Europe, East Europe, Asia-Pacific Advanced, Asia Developing, Middle East, Africa, and Latin America

MOBILE DATA SERVICES

 - SMS users, traffic, revenues, premium SMS

 - OTT Cannibalization of messaging by traffic and by users

 - MMS users, revenues

 - Mobile VAS (non-messaging premium data) users, revenues

 - Mobile users of internet, PC users of internet, Mobile-only users, PC-only users, Both Mobile & PC users of internet

 - Mobile service revenues for TV & video, mobile social networking, news & alerts, gaming, advertising

SMARTPHONE APPS

 - Consumer app revenues, business app revenues

 - App revenues in context of VAS and messaging revenues

CUSTOMER TYPE

 - Consumer & enterprise/business subscriptions

 - Consumer & enterprise/business smartphones

 - Prepaid vs Postpaid customers

ANNUAL SUMMARY TABLES

 - One page summaries of the most important 20 mobile stats per year for 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018

 

This is the best one-source resource for you as a guide into the future. It only costs 99.00 Euros and is available immediately as an ebook download. It is formated for the small screen, so you can carry the TomiAhonen Mobile Forecast 2014-2018 in your pocket, on your iPhone or Android or whatever device. It is in basic PDF format so you can also read it on your other digital devices like your PC, laptop and iPad.

If you are involved in any way in the planning and future of mobile, you need this Forecast. Note it costs a tiny fraction of most other forecasts that often sell for thousands of dollars. But you can trust this, as I have been called the most accurate forecaster of the mobile industry, and I am the father of more theories about this industry than any other expert. My 12 published books are already referenced in more than 140 books by my peers, and Forbes measured me as the most influential expert in mobile. My forecasts are regularly quoted in various global media like the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Business Week, the Economist etc, as well as over 500 press mentions in two dozen languages, and I am often seen on TV talking about mobile industry numbers.

 

To see more including full table of contents, please see TomiAhonen Mobile Forecast 2014-2018.

The Truth Is In The Pocket - Now New Zealand statistic is repeated in USA by Pew

Pew has just released a MAGNIFICENT bit of research. It is as far as I can see, the most thorough deep, massive consumer behavior survey ever conducted in any one country, about mobile behavior. They have 3 separate Pew research projects combined into the survey findings, including - as far as I know the first time ever - a week-long period when a panel of 1,600 smartphone owning adults did TWO surveys PER DAY for the week, about HOW and WHY they use their phones. Its incredible. Seven pages of findings online, all free, go read it all. This is THE BEST data of this depth ever reported anywhere. (Don't just read the first page, it gets really good pages 3-4-5). Truly valuable insights, thank you Pew for the excellent research and releasing all that info into the public domain.

Now, its a survey of smartphone owners (so remember, as the USA now is at 64% of adults owning a smartphone - by those fresh April 2015 Pew numbers - this is behavior by the affluent middle class and those one third, mostly poor, who can't afford smartphones and still have dumbphones, their behavior isn't quite like this. But this is now just about 2/3 of the total US adult population. Secondly, yes its above 18 year olds, so we know young people are very addicted to tech and youth behavior is missing. Even so, adults, in USA, only smartphone users, it is the best deepest most thorough research I have ever seen on a national scale on one survey sample (or actually combining findings from 3 surveys but by the same organization, over roughly the same period of time, released now at the same time as one study).

THE TRUTH IS IN THE POCKET

I will want to come back for many other fascinating findings, but today I wanted to just start on one point. I first found research about this peculiar new change in human behavior, I like to call 'The Truth Is In The Pocket;' phenomenon in 2012. The research was by Vodafone in the country and reported that among all New Zealanders, 38% had been in a situation of an argument, debate or bet, that they had gone to their pocket and Googled the fact, or gone to Wikipedia etc. To resolve an argument, we now go to the pocket. Why, because... The Truth Is In The Pocket. And I said that while that finding was first noticed in New Zealand, it no doubt was a universal trend and that it was one of the biggest changes in human behavior, why? Because it changes the very relationship with human beings and facts. Humans and information. Humans and the truth. If we get into an argument about say who won the championship in whatever sport that particular year, or whatever fact, we now no longer are stuck in an endless pingpong of yelling and heated argument, we now quietly go into our pockets, and Google it, or check it on Wikipedia. Argument is settled!

That was just over one in 3 in New Zealand three YEARS ago, but NZ is of course one of the more advanced countries in mobile, as is much of the Asia-Pacific region like Australia, Singapore, Taiwan etc. (even as a fresh Australian survey found that local Australian tech executives felt their country was lagging haha, they should go visit the USA or Canada or Belgium to see whose really lagging). Oh, the relevant part in the Vodafone NZ study - it was among all New Zealand mobile owners, not just smartphone owners.

So fast forward 3 years, now we have fresh Pew study, and as far as I've seen, its the first time that same question was asked in another country. And while its only asked of smatphone users, the result was ... drumroll ... 53% of adult US smartphone owners. So across all US adults, thats 34%. Essentially similar finding now in the USA, as New Zealand had three years ago (once AGAIN proving the USA is a laggard in mobile but thats another story, the Pew study is full of such findings by the way).

So. First. Put this thought into your mind because now we have two countries reporting it. More than one in three adults have already experienced the situation, where they are in an argument, a debate, a discussion, a dispute, a pub quiz or whatever, and they decided to find the truth by going to their pocket. The Truth Is In Our Pocket. This changes the relationship between humans and facts, humans and information. We learn that all truth lies there, in the pocket. So the next time we need to find a place, we feel a pain and are worried about our health, or we want to do a price check or we are worried the taxi driver is deliberately driving in a circle to make our faxi fare higher, we now know: The Truth Is In Our Pocket. Yes, more than 1 in 3 New Zealanders, just over 1 in 3 Americans already have done this. No doubt its over half of Europeans and probably 3 in 4 Japanese and Koreans who have also done this. But yes, this is a train that only goes one way. The very relationship between humans and information is now changing. Previously that info rested 'somewhere' and we had to go to the library to find out, or wait until we got home, read it in the telephone book or looked up a map or more recently, went online. But with mobile, The Truth Is In Our Pocket.

I have noticed it myself in my public speaking. I often like to do an audience quiz and give away a few prizes like say my latest Almanac (its coming in a few weeks, if you order the 2014 edition now, you get both for hte same low price, and don't worry that the website shows an older edition, I just haven't had time to go update that page, of course I ship the latest edition always). So I ask some question of some fact or stat about mobile. And now increasingly the winner is someone who Googled it right on the spot, in the audience. And I apprecaite that. Because.... The Truth Is In The Pocket.

I said in 2012 that this is an awesome finding and it will change humankind (here is a slide set of me at the MMA Forum in Vietnam talking about it, see slide 4). Now we have the first instance of that same finding by a separate research body, in another major country. And the finding is consistent. This is a great research finding and that alone makes the Pew study released just now a magnificent read. Except there are TONS more of excellent insights coming out of it. I will return to this topic soon for more. Go read the Pew Study now (and read all of it not just the first page)..