Filling In the Missing Bits: Kantar Numbers and World Smartphone Market

Time for a regional-split analysis of smartphone new sales. Kantar does nice market detail from a select group of countries. They've just released their update with data from the EU5, US, China, Australia and Japan markets. It is not a total world view but it helps us map out the market. We can use the countries excluding China, to get an approximation of the rich world market size. Beware however, that this latest market snapshot by Kantar is now the optimal iPhone market moment, right after the newest iPhone had been released and just before the next new Samsung Galaxy model is released. This period's performance will skew more in favor of the iPhone than a 'full year' analysis but we need to go with the data we find, ie in this case what Kantar will tell us.

When the numbers are weighted by population, we get the rich world smartphone OS split is roughly 66% for Android and 34% for iOS. China numbers come straight from Kantar as 83% for Android and 17% for iOS. We know the total world sales for the last quarter of 2016 (Christmas quarter) where the split was 82% Android and 18% iPhone. So we can now calculate out the 'Rest of the World' market share for Brazil, Russia, India, Nigeria, Indonesia etc and we arrive at 88% Android, 12% iOS. (I am excluding the tiny OS platforms that have less than 1% global share like Tizen, Linux, Blackberry and Windows). So we get an estimate of the world market shares by Rich World/China/Emerging World like this:


Smartphone Global Market by Market Affluence in Q4 2016:
Rich World Countries . . . . . . . Android 66% . . . . iOS 34%
China . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Android 83% . . . . iOS 17%
Emerging World Countries  . . Android 88% . . . . iOS 12%
World smartphones . . . . . . . . Android 82% . . . . iOS 18%
Sources: Kantar Worldpanel and TomiAhonen Consulting Analysis, 16 March 2017
This table may be freely shared


That is your market split. Even in the rich world Android now outsells iPhones at 2 to 1 ratio. And outside of the rich world it is 1 in 6 or less that are iPhones. To understand how to adjust these numbers for an annual number - this quarter Apple has 18% market share but for full calendar year 2016 Apple only had 15% market share. For the full year those regional splits would need to be adjusted downward for the iPhone and upward for Androids, by about 3 points per region, to get annual data levels. If you want more regional handset data including a regional split in more detail (8 regions) and by various other measures like installed base of OS platforms etc, then please see the brand new TomiAhonen Phone Book 2016 that just came out just over two months ago. It has 180 pages and over 100 charts and tables on all the handset data - smartphones and dumbphones - you could ever hope for.

Comments

[Winter]

@Wayne
Yawn.

Sounds to me like Top Gear (a show I never watch) discussing potential sales of new Mercedes models (a brand I never drive).

[Tester]

What I find far more interesting about these numbers is not Android vs. iOS, but the fact that in nearly every significant market the increase in market share came nearly exclusively from Windows Phone finally tanking.

[Winter]

@Tester
"... in nearly every significant market the increase in market share came nearly exclusively from Windows Phone finally tanking."

Please elaborate, I must be missing something.

[Winter]

Tomi, I remember you had made a prediction about price developments of Android smartphones. I saw a new entry:

Alcatel Pixi 4 (4) for 49,95 euro.

Specs seem better than iPhone 3:
Android 6
4 inch screen
4 GB memmory
0.5 GB RAM
Two cameras with some kind of flash
2MP camera
Two SIM card slots