Communities Dominate Brands

Humanity are the data wells that make the black gold of the 21st Century

Refined data the black gold of the 21st Century

Data is the new oil !!

John Naughton in his recent column for The Observer, wrote that in 2006 or thereabouts, a phrase that data was the new oil came into public consciousness. At the time I was sitting on the board of a company specialising in large scale social data analytics (in those days mobile networks were large scale social networks), And I liked to use the term raw data has no value but refined data is the black gold of the 21st Century. My thoughts were that better information created at the size of bytes could deliver better.

Commercial models could evolve and made more effective and efficient, transformed even, by raw data becoming refined data. But there was the potential for much greater things, significant improvements if not transformation in healthcare, education, agriculture, finance, that could deliver so much to us as a society.

The argument for an open model: my argument was that if data was shared, in an open context; open data, open society, open api's we could all benefit. For example, MIT shares its entire curriculum under a creative commons license. Openness is resilience, the default setting not only of what we call nature but our entire cosmology works because of its connectedness and diversity.

The darker side of data: of course this is all true, but the recent developments and revelations from Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden, and Wikileaks is that governments are hoovering up of vast amounts of data, and breaking their own constitutions, it seems, in the process. Whilst we do not know a thing about it. In the same way corporations are behaving in exactly the same way.

The key question about any major technological development is: who benefits? The answer in the case of big data is: huge corporations – the Googles, Amazons and Facebooks of this world, which are the only outfits (outside of the US National Security Agency) with the computational resources to mine, analyse and process the data torrents unleashed by us as we go about our networked lives. The companies don't talk about it this way, of course. Instead they have soothing patter about how their analytical capabilities enable them to serve you better: how the ability to analyse the web searches conducted by you and your friends enables them to provide better search results, for example; or how analysis of your online behaviour enables Amazon to suggest products that you might like; and so on.

All true, of course, but skilfully avoiding the awkward fact that you are the resource that is being mined and that the playing field that is cyberspace is tilted in favour of the corporations who have come to dominate it.

We, Naughton observes are the wells. 

Data, power, privacy, democracy: Naughtons view is dark and dystopian a bit like J.G. Ballard and I don't blame him. After giving a presentation to a technology audience earlier this year, in which I explored the potential of data combined with networked mobile communication technologies to deliver better healthcare, civic infrastructures, education etc., I explored how a city becomes more efficient through large scale data monitoring – then I became deeply concerned, because, if Rio De Janeiro, or Paris, or wherever has all its utilities managed at an atomic level via data and that is run by a private company (IBM), then the question I asked was, has the city lost its sovereignty?

My unease is that corporations are first and foremost responsible to their shareholders and the stockmarket, not to civic duty. And of course this presentation dovetailed with the breaking news of Edward Snowden, and the trial of Bradley Manning. Data, control, coercion, power, and privacy. They all intertwine, democracy in essence is the concept of an open world and that is what I think many fear - we have turned away from the well of democracy to suck at the well of data for darker purposes. And it is darker as there is no consultation of the public realm, no communication of why, purpose and legal remit. We simply must, says the state, be saved from ourselves. Therein lies the catch 22, data is information, nature runs on information freely shared, we call it diversity, the universe is an open eco-system that is perhaps the greater giver of life, taking that idea further communications is also all about power, who has it, who controls it, and ultimately who wields it.

A story about power: Manuel Castells has written extensively on this particular issue in his book Communication Power. And that is the point John Naughton and Slavoj Žižek make on communications, privacy, democracy Perhaps even the potential of our democracies to progress in their current state. For me the bigger picture is that, the more we remove openness from the public realm, the more we monitor because we are fearful of 'the others', the more we attempt to extract rather that regenerate - we are not in a good place. I still believe that data used in the right way can deliver extraordinary benefits to everyday lives in a multiplicity of ways. I worry that since 911 however, our fear of 'the others', has driven us away from working out why our world feels more unsafe, and our response of 'control at all costs', inadequate, because it does not solve the problem. And I also worry that the pursuit of financial gain at all costs (growth for growth sakes is the MO of a cancer cell) also erodes our society. So the point is then to offer an alternative positive view of what next might look like. Because if we cant describe a new destination, we will never be able to get there.

Journey further

• Open systems evolve to states of higher organization
• Designing a better NHS with data
• Monitor me, data, health and technology
• Six steps to transform the way we do business
• Ushahidi: a story of non-linear innovation
• The web giants pumping us for data

 

Are we naked with or without data?

Excerpt from No Straight Lines

Chapter Five: The big P and little p of transformation: once you have stormed the Bastille, you don’t go back to your day job

As the shape of our world evolves, we are also in political transformation, both in terms of the political relationship between the individual and commercial organisations and the large Politics of how we organise and run our societies. What should government look like in a non-linear world? Are we creating and running the right systems in the right way? How does data change/impact the process of democracy and civil organisation? Refined data is the black gold of the 21st Century.

Data, democracy and identity: Where to start on this particular part of the journey through our non-linear world? The first step must address the issue of data; who would have thought even in 2005, that consumer politics and societal politics would revolve around data, who has it, who owns it and how it is used, combined with the legal frameworks that protect us as citizens.

The recent events around Edward Snowden, Prism, Tempora and Boundless Informant, demonstrate what I meant. In a recent interview with Henry Jenkins I wrote in answer to his question on data:

Data is integral to what comes next, thinking from a perspective of openness and aesthetics of design in that only ugly thoughts bring to bear ugly realities. It may not at first seem a clear connection between data, individual sovereignty and democracy. However once we understand that at high level the commercial world seeks to influence and in some cases coerce political institutions then we have to see them as linked. Or indeed that political ideology seeks to direct the course of political outcomes as is the case in Pennsylvania at the moment and elsewhere where Republicans seeks to make it much harder for various sections of the African-American community to vote in the hope they weaken Obama’s chances of re-election.

In Britain there are attempts by the Government of the day to legislate so that they can access and extract comprehensive, fine-grained covert surveillance of entire populations. All our digital activity: voice, text, Google searches, a level of surveillance that is unprecedented and perhaps pernicious.

Read full article

(Posted by Tomi T Ahonen on behalf of Alan Moore)

Rare National Smartphone Market Data via Mary Meeker - Analyzed further and reported also Per Capita + Bonus! Estimate of regional smartphone new sales market sizes for 2013

We have fresh smartphone penetration rate data across major countries! I've meant to do this for a while but its been busy, but still, as these are new numbers on very rare info, I want to share it with all.

 

Mary Meeker we all know, the goddess of all internet stats, who often gives very good mobile related numbers too. She has in her latest numbers included a table of the 30 biggest countries by their smartphone population in use (see Slide number 7). So, these are the 30 countries who had at least 6 million or more smartphones in use by Q4 of 2012, ie at the end of the year. I should immediately point out, that several of the traditional smartphone leaders in terms of penetration rate are countries whose population is so small, they can't fit onto this table, ie Finland, Norway, Denmark (each with a population of 5 million), Singapore, Ireland, New Zealand (each with a population of 4 million). And the UAE with 8 million, is probably very near the 31st country on her list of Top 30, as the UAE has recently been reported with about 75% smartphone penetration, being right there at the cut-off point of 6 million smartphones in use... But lets ignore the 'small countries' and look at the countries whose national population is typically over 10 million (or near it, Hong Kong at 7 million, Sweden at 8 million). Which countries currently have the largest populations of smartphones in use?

I have taken Mary's data and added the relevant country population data (she published hers with the interesting - but misleading - statistic of "smartphones as percent of all mobile subscribers". That may seem 'logical' until you notice that Canada has under 100% mobile penetration while Hong Kong has over 200% penetration rate in mobile subscriptions. That measure allows for hideously misleading interpretations. So by her measure, Canada and Hong Kong appear almost equal in their 'smartphone migration' rate, whereas if we compare 'per capita' to the human population alive in the country, Hong Kong has almost exactly twice as high reach of smartphones in use per capita, as has Canada. So I am using of course the smartphone per capita statistic as the measure for rankings in this table:

 

Smartphone Penetrations in countries that have over 6 million smartphones in use:

 

COUNTRY . . . POPULATION . . . SMARTPHONES . . . SMARTPHONES PER CAPITA

 

Hong Kong . . . . . 7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85%

 (Note: Singapore and Macau track very close to Hong Kong)

Sweden . . . . . . . 9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85%

 (Note: Finland, Norway, Denmark and Iceland track very close to Sweden)

Australia . . . . . 22 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72%

 (Note: New Zealand tracks very close to Australia)

South Korea  . . 48 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66%

Japan . . . . . . . 126 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62%

UK. . . . . . . . . . . 62 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56%

 (Note: Ireland tracks very close to UK)

Netherlands . . . 17 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54%

 (Note: Switzerland and Austria usually track hear Netherlands)

USA . . . . . . . . 320 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54%

Saudi Arabia . . 28 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53%

 (Note: UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar track usually well ahead of Saudi Arabia)

Canada . . . . . . 34 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44%

France . . . . . . . 63 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41%

Malaysia . . . . . 29 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41%

Spain . . . . . . . . 46 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39%

Italy . . . . . . . . . 61 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31%

Taiwan . . . . . . . 23 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30%

Germany . . . . . . 82 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30%

Brazil . . . . . . . . 201 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27%

Argentina . . . . . . 42 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26%

Poland . . . . . . . . 38 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23%

South Africa. . . . 52 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21%

Thailand . . . . . . . 71 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20%

China . . . . . . . 1,482 . . . . . . . . . . . . 270 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18%

Turkey . . . . . . . . 75 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17%

Philippines . . . . . 96 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16%

Russia . . . . . . . . 147 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15%

Mexico . . . . . . . 117 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13%

Indonesia . . . . . 247 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11%

Egypt . . . . . . . . . 84 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8%

India . . . . . . . 1,261 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3%

 

Source: TomiAhonen Consulting Analysis from Mary Meeker & Informa data, and UN population statistics, April 2013

This data may be freely shared

 

So when we add the 'usual suspect' smaller countries like Singapore, Finland, New Zealand, Switzerland etc, we get 22 countries already where smartphone penetration rate is past 50% per capita. And by now, April of 2013, we have just about 10 countries where there is a smartphone for three quarters of the population - Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Australia and New Zealand. Previously (but not verified by these Mary Meeker numbers) we also heard that the UAE had passed 75% smartphone penetration by early 2012, so we should also have Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar with more than 75% smarpthone penetration, so very likely the count is 14 (mostly small, and obviously very affluent) countries.

 

WORLD MARKET FOR SMARTPHONES 2013

 

Last year the world saw 695 million smartphones sold (almost twice the number of all types of PCs, and about four out of every ten mobile phones sold overall). This year we will see about 1 Billion new smartphones sold. How are those split regionally? I used the Mary Meeker numbers to determine year 2012 installed base regionally - her numbers accounted for 88% of all smartphones in use. I then used a population-adjusted model to fill in the missing national penetrations, by region. And then used a growth estimator for the different regions, based on how high their current installed base and migration rate is, obviously in the West we do not see heavy growth rates anymore in smartphones, the growth is mild, while in the Emerging World the growth rates are huge. So with that, I got this mix of the regional split of the global smartphone market for 2013. This is new sales of smartphones this year, 2013, split by region:

 

 

Source: TomiAhonen Consulting Analysis April 2013, projected from Mary Meeker Q4 2012 data and other smartphone market sources including TomiAhonen Phone Book 2012

This picture may be freely shared

 

Note, as the market is expected to be very near exactly 1 Billion new smartphones sold this year, you can take those numbers and convert multiply the percentages by 10 to get the number sold. So for China, 27% means 270 million smartphones this year as the Chinese market size, and for North America 13% means 130 million smartphones sold etc. Yes, China alone this year will see approximately twice as many new smartphones sold as in all of North America. And Asia accounts for almost exactly half of all new smartphones sold this year, led by China, but including the rich parts of Asia like Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong etc, and then the Emerging World parts of the 'Rest of Asia' ie India, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines etc etc etc. Half of all smartphones sold this year will go to Asia.

 

FOR MATH GEEKS

 

And for those who want to do their own math at home, haha.. Here are the multipliers you can get rough estimates of quarterly market sizes, if you know the full year sales level (at 1 Billion for this year):

 

Q1 = 21% = 210 million in 2013

Q2 = 22% = 220 million in 2013

Q3 = 25% = 250 million in 2013

Q4 = 32% = 320 million in 2013

TOTAL = 100% = 1 Billion smartphones in 2013

(This are based on 2012 numbers, expecting the ratio to be very similar this year, with the exception of if there is a major economic collapse that suddenly kills sales).

So with those numbers, you can for example see, that the US market for smartphones in Q1 was about (using the formula: 210 million x 13% = 27.3) so 27.3 million actual units of smartphones sold. So as market data, we know from Nokia Q1 results this past week, that Nokia sold 400,000 units of smartphones in North America in Q1, so Nokia's smartphone market share would be 1.4% in North America right now, including all Windows Phone Lumia and the random last Symbian unit, combined. As a sanity check, when we examine Kantar February 2013 numbers from their market data analysis of the US market, they suggest Nokia Symbian and Windows Phone should have 4.2% of the US smartphone market, that would suggest 33% of the US market for Windows Phone was held by Nokia in Q1, and 67% went to the rivals on Windows Phone platform like HTC and Samsung. So the other stronger brands in the US market would have sold approximately 800,000 Windows Phone handsets, which again would be consistent with the level of sales that is non-Nokia on a global level, with Windows Phone (as we heard, those manufacturers shrunk or ended their marketing of Windows Phone for non-US markets in Q4). When we look at the MKM intent to buy survey also for the US right now, they had 0.7% of US consumers willing to buy a Nokia Lumia smartphone. If half of US phones sold roughly speaking now are smarpthones, that is again consistent with 1.4% smartphone market share.

 

As a second sanity check, lets take another major market and another brand. Lets look at China and Lenovo. The math suggests Chinese market to be about (Formula: 270 million x 21% in Q1 = 56.7) so 56.7 million units right now. Lenovo said in Q4 that almost all of their sales were still from China as they were just entering Russia, India, etc. So if we look at Lenovo's Q4 sales at 9.4 million, it suggests a 16.5% market share if that level continued to now. Strategy Analytics reported that for the full year sales, Lenovo's China market share was 13%. Again, reasonably close, allowing for Lenovo's rapid growth, its annual average (13%) would have to be by necessity lower than its current level (16%). Again the sanity check is very strong, that these numbers are good estimates.

So there you have it, national penetration rates for 30 countries reported in absolute numbers and as penetration rate per capita. I've added a dozen more smaller countries via their proxies, to indicate where we might find Norway or Macau or Kuwait etc. And based on those numbers, I've calculated the market size estimators updated for 2013, for the regional/continental market sizes for smartphone sales this year. All data on this blog obviously free to use, and free to share and feel free to create better tables, graphics etc from the above data.

For those who want much more in handset data, please see my TomiAhonen Phone Book 2012. And for those who may need to plan for the future, you may want to see the projections on over 100 data points into the next few years, by the most accurate forecaster in the mobile industry. See my TomiAhonen Mobile Forecast 2012-2015 if that might be of use.

The Annual Mobile Industry Numbers and Stats Blog - Yep, this year we will hit the Mobile Moment..

So its that time again. I just finished the 2013 edition of the TomiAhonen Almanac, my annual statistical volume on the status of the mobile industry, and as usual, to celebrate that publication, I will do the big update to all the mobile numbers. You may want to bookmark this page for future reference

MOBILE NOW 6.7 BILLLION ACCOUNTS

So the monster number first. The global count of active mobile subscriptions reached 6.7 Billion at the end of 2012, and yes, this summer we will hit the 'mobile moment' ie that point in time when for the first time ever on this planet, a consumer technology will match the human population in size. The planet has 7.1 Billion people and as we grew subscriptions 14% last year, its rather clear we will hit that 7.1 Billion number around the summer of 2013. What was the penetration rate per capita at the end of last year? 93.7%. And there is no stopping that growth, don't listen to those who once again suggest that we are 'near saturation'. Hogwash! Several countries, led by Hong Kong are past 200% mobile penetration rate per capita. This growth is not stopping anytime soon.

So lets dig in. What does 6.7 Billion mobile subscriptions mean, then? They are not in reality all individual unique users, as we well know by now, many of us walk around with two phones, or others with one phone but several mobile accounts in the form of SIM cards. How many of the 6.7 Billion is the 'unique user' number? 4.3 Billion unique mobile phone owners/users on the planet. 60.1% of the true alive human population does have at least one mobile phone and at least one mobile account to themselves. Never has any technology been this widely spread. We are hitting the limits of electricity (600 million live beyond the reach of the electrical grid) and literacy (800 million adults are illiterate on the planet) yet even they do have mobile phone accounts. Some phones sold in the Emerging World are sold with extra-capacity batteries, other phones are sold with two or three batteries to help with the electricity problem. Vodafone introduced in Africa a charge that works on solar energy and for rainy days, through peddaling on your bicycle. And literacy? Yes, the illiterate won't be buying your smartphone apps anytime soon, but many voice-oriented services are highly appreciated delivering news, sports scores, music etc (and advertising) through the voice channel on the mobile.

ACTUAL PHONES - 5.2 BILLION IN USE

So then what of the phones? The planet has now 5.2 Billion mobile phone handsets in use, so for the 4.3 Billion unique users, so 26% of us - 1.1 Billion people already - walk around with two phones in their pockets. As I've been reporting on this phenomenon over the years, it is no longer a surprise in most markets. But yes, 5.2 Billion digital devices in human hands worldwide, every one of which can do voice calls and SMS text messaging. Most which have a color screen and often camera too. Most which can do rudimentary internet services (on WAP) and the vast majority which can do full HTML 'real internet' as well. While only 22% of all phones in use globally are 'smartphones' actually more than half of all phones in use can accept apps through such technologies as Java.

83% of all phones in use are cameraphones, so 4.4 Billion cameras are used in the world that are also connected to the network and are always carried, rather than the more premium stand-alone cameras that often sit in their cases back home. More than 90% of all humans who have ever taken a picture, have only done so on a cameraphone, not a stand-alone digital or film-based 'traditional' camera.

How massive is this? Mobile phones connected and in use totally dwarf any other tech, outnumbering television sets by more than 2 to 1, personal computers of all types, including tablet PCs like the iPad, by more than 4 to 1, DVD players by 5 to 1. Newspaper circulations by 12 to 1. Even after we account for us Westerners owning many FM radio sets, in our clock-radios, our boom boxes, our home HiFi sets and our cars, when counting for the whole planet, the number of mobile phones exceeds FM radios even, today. The second most sold consumer tech is the personal computer (including desktops, laptops and tablet PCs like the iPad) which has annual sales of about 350 million per year. The third most sold tech is televisions which only sell 250 million per year. Everything else is peanuts below that, from gaming consoles to cameras. But mobile phones? Sold over 1.7 Billion units last year! And by Christmas Quarter, nearly half of all new phones sold worldwide were smartphones. This year, 2013, we will see the cross-over point, where half of all new phones sold will be smartphones. No wonder the world's largest consumer electronics giant, Sony says that mobile is front and center of their future. Here is your table:

MOBILE SUBCRIBERS 2012
Total active mobile subscriptions or accounts . . . . 6.7B (was 5.9B in 2011, growth 14%)
Unique mobile users . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 B (was 4.0B in 2011, growth 8%)
Actual mobile phones in use . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 B (was 4.8B in 2011, growth 8%)
Source: TomiAhonen Almanac 2013
This data may be freely shared

INDUSTRY WORTH $1.45 TRILLION

So who is the richest man on the planet? No longer Bill Gates of Microsoft, it is Carlos Slim the CEO of America Movil the Mexico-based telecoms giant. Apple Computer changed its name to just Apple when it launched the iPhone and today calls itself a mobile company. Samsung the world's biggest tech company makes half of its profits through the mobile unit. Companies from Warner Music to Electronic Arts to the Associated Press newspaper guild are turning to mobile to make more money. The BBC said that all broadcast content, TV and radio, will be available on mobile. Visa says the future of payments, yes, the future of money itself, is mobile. What is this industry like?

Well, as the global economy struggled to get some anemic growth in 2012, the mobile industry grew its revenues by a massive 12% and hit 1.45 Trillion US dollars in total for the year. The mobile industry set the record for the fastest industry ever to reach that massive Trillion-dollar level (far bigger than for example the PC or TV or internet or advertising industries, just so you have some context). This global economic juggernaut is fuelled primarily by our voice calls and mobile messages (SMS and MMS) but there is an increasing part of revenues coming from 'premium data' services and also a healthy slice from hardware, in particular the handset sales. 3 out of every 4 dollars earned in the industry was service revenues, the remaining 1 out of 4 is hardware revenues ie handsets, their accessories, and the networking infrastructure needed to run these massive mobile telecoms networks. The major breakdown of the industry revenue is:

MOBILE INDUSTRY REVENUES 2012
Service Revenues . . . . . . . . .$1,101 B
 - Voice calls . . . . . . . . . . . . $  664 B
 - Non-messaging data . . . . . $  243 B
 - Messaging . . . . . . . . . . . . $  193 B
Hardware Revenues . . . . . . . $   350 B
 - Handset sales . . . . . . . . .  $  240 B
 - Accessories . . . . . . . . . . . $    65 B
 - Networking equipment . . . . $    45 B
Source: TomiAhonen Almanac 2013
This data may be freely shared


AVERAGE USER

So what do we do with our phones? I did the analysis of that statistic earlier, that we look at our phones 150 times per day. That gives a pretty good idea of where our time goes with the phone - messaging obviously, and voice calls, but also our clock and alarm, the calendar, our camera, the web browser, some games and music, news alerts etc. How do we use our phones? This is how I broke it down:

How Typical User Looks at Mobile 150 Times Per Day Globally
Messaging related 23 times per day
Voice call related 22 times per day
Clock 18 times per day
Music Player 13 times per day
Gaming 12 times per day
Social Media 9 times per day
Alarm 8 times per day
Camera 8 times per day
News and alerts 6 times per day
Calendar 5 times per day
Search 3 times per day
Other random web browsing 3 times per day
Charging phone 3 times per day
Voice mail 1 times per day
Other miscellaneous uses 10 times per day
Total 150 times per day
Source: TomiAhonen Almanac 2013
This data may be freely shared

MOBILE HANDSET FEATURES

Then we of course look at the handset side of mobile in the Almanac. I devote a whole chapter to the handset numbers including the highly popular chart updating the global mobile installed base of the 5.2 Billion handsets in use, by their features. How many have a color screen, or have a camera, or have WiFi, etc. Here are the top-line numbers:

POPULAR MOBILE PHONE FEATURES OF INSTALLED BASE 2012
SMS texting ability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100%
Any kind of browser (including WAP) . . . . 98%
MMS multimedia messaging capable . . . . 88%
Cameraphone (ie has inbuilt camera) . . . . 83%
Bluetooth  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79%
3G capable or faster cellular connectivity . 45% *
WiFi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26%
Smartphone . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . 22%
 * note, many 3G phones in use are not connected to a 3G network, and even often if they are, are not on 3G dataplan pricing plans, so 3G user numbers are far below this installed base
Source: TomiAhonen Almanac 2013
This data may be freely shared

Much much more in the TomiAhonen Almanac 2013 including the penetration rates of touch screens, of QWERTY keyboards, the camera resolutions of cameraphones, etc etc etc, plus of course also the 'horse race' statistics of who sold the most phones last year by brand.

SMARTPHONE INSTALLED BASED BY PLATFORM

What of the mobile 'ecosystems' out there? You often hear of single quarter sales that may fluctuate a lot. Individual handset makers may shift their allegiances from one smartphone OS platform to another. What is the state of the industry now, by installed base of smartphone platforms. That is the 'bottom line' question, isn't it? I keep reporting the status of the installed base here on this blog as I do my quarterly review of the smartphone races. This is what the world looked like at the end of 2012:

Installed Base of Smartphones by Operating System 2012 (vs 2011)
1 (2) - Google Android . . . . . . . . . . 48% (31%)
2 (3) - Apple iPhone  . . . . . . . . . . . 19% (16%)
3 (1) - Nokia Symbian . . . . . . . . . . 15% (33%)
4 (4) - RIM Blackberry . . . . . . . . . . . 8% (12%)
5 (5) - Samsung bada  . . . . . . . . . .  2% ( 3%)
6 (7) - MS Windows Phone  . . . . . .  2% ( 1%)
7 (6) - MS Windows Mobile . . . . . . . 1% ( 2%)
Others . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1% (3%)
TOTAL SMARTPHONES IN USE . . . 1,320 Million
Source: TomiAhonen Almanac 2013
This data may be freely shared

But there is so much more in the Almanac. I have whole chapters on mobile advertising and marketing, mobile music, mobile social networking, mobile TV and video, mobile gaming, mobile messaging - yes, of course this year's edition includes OTT messaging cannibalization measured - etc, etc, etc. I give you counts of apps and voice calls and enterprise/business accounts and 3G migration rates. The Almanac includes a whole chapter on the Digital Divide, so it shows how the advanced 'West' or Industrialized World mobile numbers differ from the 'Emerging World' where most people live, in Africa, Latin America and the less-developed parts of Asia like India, China, Indonesia, Pakistan etc. I also give more details on the business-side of this newest and fastest-growing Trillion-dollar industry ever, like my exclusive TomiAhonen Consulting index of mobile leadership that many seem to like and use.

WHAT COUNTRIES ARE THE GLOBAL LEADERS IN MOBILE INDUSTRY AND INNOVATION

Here is the newest top 12 ranking of the world's most advanced countries by their mobile industry, handset, consumer and services maturity:

WORLD'S MOST ADVANCED COUNTRIES RANKED BY THE MATURITY OF THEIR MOBILE INDUSTRY
1 (1) - Japan
2 (3) - Singapore
3 (2) - South Korea
4 (5) - Finland
5 (6 tie) - Taiwan
6 (6 tie) - Sweden
7 (4) - Italy
8 (9) - Hong Kong
9 (8) - Austria
10 tie (13 tie) - Denmark
10 tie (12) - UK
12 (10) - Australia
Source: TomiAhonen Almanac 2013
This data may be freely shared

And yes, the USA is gaining on that chart, and has moved up from its rank last year of 17th to its current ranking of tied for 15th with the Netherlands, just ahead of UAE, and just behind Israel and Norway. But when the USA is barely past its 100% per-capita mobiel subscriber count - and Hong Kong for example has passed 200%, or the USA is near 50% smartphone ownership where Singapore is past 80%, and where the USA still sells handsets and subscriptions to second generation 2G network based technology while Japan has shut down the 2G networks and is all 3G or faster, obviously there are other countries that are well ahead of the USA in their mobile industry. Harsh truths, but we deal with the truth on this blog. And yes, for those who do not know my index, I use the four most used and most representative statistics on the maturity of the industry, to generate my index: the mobile phone subscription penetration rate per capita; the migration rate to more advanced networks, the mobile service adoption rate, and the migration of the handsets to more advanced phones (ie currently measuring the migration from dumbphones to smartphones). And most international mobile industry experts will agree that Japan, Singapore and South Korea are world leaders in mobile, and that Finland, Sweden and Italy are the European leaders, where the Industrialized part of Asia and advanced parts of Europe are well ahead of North America, Latin America and Africa in their mobile adoption and yes, Australia is well ahead of North America as well. By the way, the Almanac has much more on the index and the top 30 countries if you need more.

But there are much much more data points in the Almanac, including a stats table section where we have the 60 biggest mobile countries and details on them like their subscriber counts, penetration rates per capita, and exclusively, also their unique mobile owner counts, plus such data as what countries have launched 3G and what have launched MVNO services etc. There are tables of what countries lead by subscriber counts, by penetration rates, by 3G migration rates etc. And there is the list of the biggest mobile operator groups.

WHO ARE THE GIANT COMPANIES OF THIS TRILLION-DOLLAR INDUSTRY?

And as always, the TomiAhonen Almanac includes my exclusive listing of the world's largest companies, when measured only by their mobile revenues. So for example for Apple we remove the Mac, iPad and iPod related incomes, for Vodafone we remove their fixed landline business and for Samsung we remove their plasma TV business and chips business, etc. What are the world's largest companies in 2012 when we only measure their mobile business? This is what the top 10 looks like for 2012:

BIGGEST COMPANIES WHEN ONLY COUNTING THEIR MOBILE BUSINESS
(This chart data is harmonized for the annual release of the Fortune Global 500 issue)
(Data is current as of the second calendar quarter of 2012 ie through about end of June 2012)
1 (1) China Mobile, China, operator . . . . . . . $ 87 B
2 (2) Verizon Wireless, USA, operator  . . . . $ 75 B
3 (9) Apple iPhone, USA, smartphones . . . . $ 74 B
4 (10) Samsung Galaxy, S Korea, handsets . $ 69 B
5 (4) AT&T Wireless, USA, operator . . . . . .  $ 62 B
6 (3) Vodafone Mobile, UK, operator . . . . . .  $ 60 B
7 (5) Telefonica Movil, Spain, operator . . . . . $ 55 B
8 (11) NTT DoCoMo, Japan, operator . . . . . . $ 48 B
9 (6) T-Mobile, Germany, operator . . . . . . . . $ 47 B
10 (7) Orange Mobile, France, operator . . . .  $ 46 B
Note: All except China Mobile in the above chart are 'virtual companies' with imaginary names to reflect their mobile businesses and their mobile branding.
Source: TomiAhonen Almanac 2013
This data may be freely shared

The above data shows how strongly Apple and Samsung have already jumped up the charts powered by their smartphone businesses (and by contrast, the once giant 'Nokia Mobile' has tumbled down to 12th and is falling further). The European operators/carriers saw their industry hit by the new EU regulations that cut their international interconnect revenues, so all Europe-based carriers/operators saw a bad fiscal year and their rankings tumbled for the year. That should stabilize now for the next year. And as to Samsung and Apple, remember, their phenomenal growth is continuing. This data was through only the second calendar quarter of 2012, to harmonize this chart with the annual Fortune Global 500 issue. So the two smartphone maker giants are sure to move up even more for next year.

So there is your summary data for the industry for big industry numbers. This year, two huge milestones coming - the Mobile Moment will hit us this summer, when the count of active mobile subscriptions will match the count of human population alive on the planet, and also probably in the summer, we will reach the point where half of all new phones sold will be smartphones.

As always, you may share and use any data in this blog, create your own diagrams and pictures, use this data in infographics etc. Please refer to this blog if you can, or just list that the source is the TomiAhonen Almanac 2013.

And for those who want to see it, or order it, remember the Almanac only costs 9.99 Euros and you can have all these stats - and literally 91 more charts and tablets not mentioned in this blog (the latest Almanac has 98 tables and charts in total) - on an ebook you can install onto your smartphone, iPad or laptop and carry all the mobile data at your fingertips. For those who already own the 2012 edition, all the data is updated obviously, and new charts in the 2013 version that weren't in the 2012 edition are: 150 Times Per day (in mobile Customers chapter), a chart showing MMS migration rate from SMS and another showing OTT cannibalization are new, while the OTT user count is added to mobile messaging user chart (in Messaging chapter),  the Social Networking chapter adds a table of the biggest social networks when measured by their mobile users. The 2013 edition of the Almanac runs 194 pages. To see more here TomiAhonen Almanac 2013. 

Early Thoughts on New Operating Systems - Ubuntu, Sailfish (Jolla/MeeGo), Tizen (Samsung's update to MeeGo), Firefox; and some updates to classics BB10, WP8

This year 2013 will see several new smartphone operating systems launched. This blog is my first overview to these new arrivals, and is in response to perhaps the most requested commentary by me, from my Twitter followers in the past few months. What do I think of Ubuntu or Firefox or Sailfish or Tizen.. (or Blackberry 10 or Windows Phone 8)

Some might think this is 'too late' and that the market is 'already settled' into the duopoly that is Google's Android, and Apple's iOS (which according to Strategy Analytics held 92% of the smartphone market in Q4. My calculations have the pair with a little bit less, but still, they are the two giants currently). That may seem reasonable, until you understand the scale of the market and the near future. Smartphones sold a little over 700 million units in 2012, up 45% from just one year before. Smartphones now sell about twice the level that personal computers of all type sell per year (that includes the tablet PCs like the iPad), and almost three times as many as television sets globally. This must be 'too late' for a new operating system to enter and become big, isn't it.

No its not. The total global handset industry sells about 1.8 billion handsets per year (ie most of those were still 'dumbphones' in 2012, and only about 39% of those were smartphones. The handset industry experts have joined me in my originally quite radical view  that all handsets would become 'smartphones' - and my view is that this transition will be completed (in new handset sales, not in installed base) before this decade is done. The annual sales of handsets will likely stabilize near the 2 Billion per year level, so we have something near 1.3 Billion annual sales growth left to do for smartphones - almost two times as much unclaimed, as the total market size in 2012.

This IS the right time to get in, if you ever wanted to be a major player in smartphones, whether on the hardware or the software and operating system size. During 2013 will we be somewhere near 1 Billion smartphone sales and about half the potential is taken. After that, it will become increasingly hard to break into the market, and probably by 2015 it will be too late.

Thats not to say, that Android isn't in the driving seat. Android was powering 70% of all smartphones sold in Q3 of 2012 and Android is used by seven of the ten largest smartphone makers, while the three others in the top 10 use three separate and incompatible systems. Android is the obvious big target and Google has played the smartphone opportunity remarkably well, so far. Apple had a strong growth trajectory in gobbling up huge chunks of market share until that growth bonanza stalled two years ago, and Apple's gains have been anemic, one or two market share points per year since. It is high time for Apple to either launch a lower-cost iPhone (what I call the iPhone Nano) or else abandon any hope of being a major player in the races, and becoming a niche maker similar to what RIM/Blackberry has become. The race for the smartphone market is mostly one of low-cost mass-market mainstream basic smartphones, not the high end of the iPhone 5 and Samsung Galaxy S4.

HOW YOU WIN IN SMARTPHONES

There will be lots of techie 'experts' who bring their 'insights' into explaining why one OS is better than another, why its UI is more appealing or its app selection is the winner, etc. They are clueless. We saw how badly these experts misunderstand the handset market, from all the forecasts made in 2010 about what will happen to Nokia smartphone sales in 2012 as the new Lumia Windows Phone strategy is implemented (experts had errors of the scale of 200% and more, the worst 'expert' organization had a forecasting error of 332% !!!). That is not an isolated example, I will shortly be reporting on how badly the tech pundits and experts misjudged the launch of Windows Phone and the Microsoft market share for 2012 (can you believe, errors up to 400% !!! ???)

Smartphones may look like tiny pocket-sized computers, so many PC industry experts are quick to offer their 'insights'. They do not know, that this industry operates on totally different market rules than the PC market. Handsets are technically approved, and supported by the carriers/operators, who act as gate-keepers to all markets. If you do not have carrier support, you cannot win in a market. Witness Apple's iPhone for example, or Microsoft's Kin (forgot about that one, did you, the phone that died in six weeks from launch, because no carriers would support it). 

In smartphones the best handset or best operating system or best app store does not win. They all are important, yes, but they are not the key to winning. Else in 2010, Apple's iPhone would have crushed Nokia's Symbian, because by every measure, in 2010, the iPhone was the better smartphone than then-current Nokia flagship, the N97; the iOS was far better than Nokia's first iteration of its aging Symbian OS attempting to do touch-screen; and the Apple iPhone App Store had more apps than Nokia's Ovi store. Why then did Nokia outsell Apple by 2 to 1, and more importantly, Apple grew 22.4 million smartphone unit sales from 2009 to 2010, but Nokia grew 35.8 million. How is it possible that a clearly inferior product line, on an inferior OS and UI, and a smaller app environment, can grow more than the better one? Its not about whose phone or OS is better in smartphones. Its about the carrier relationships (and related retail distribution). Nokia had by far the best carrier relations and retail distribution in the mobile handset industry at the time, Apple did not. So Nokia was able to sell an inferior product but get bigger growth - because of carrier relations and distribution.

Again, this is no anomaly. Look at Palm and the WebOS, the best smartphone and OS this side of an iPhone. It died. Being best does not give you the world. Or Samsung's bada - my apologies to all my Samsung friends, but bada was hardly the most exciting most advanced most capable OS. Yet it sold 20 million units in 2012. Why? Because Samsung currently has the best carrier relationships and widest distribution channel reach of any handset maker in the world.

Please do not misunderstand me. I am not saying the handset design doesn't matter, that the user interface doesn't matter or the app store doesn't matter etc. I AM saying, that they will not decide your success. The decisive factor is carrier support, the second most important factor is resale distribution deals. Of course a good OS is better than having a bad one, that the iOS is so user-friendly that a 3 year old understands how to use an iPhone, and so does a 93 year old, without reading any user manuals - that is why Apple's iPhone has such fiercely loyal customer retention rates. But that is mostly loyalty and retention (Nokia used to have that too, with its messaging, its cameras, its QWERTY keyboards, its FM radios etc..). The key to gaining market share - especially for a new brand - is carrier support and retail distribution. Carrier backlash is one of the biggest reasons that has caused Blackberry to decline sales in past two years. Carrier support is why Huawei has been so successful in gaining big chunks of market share globally (partly helped by the fact that Huawei can bundle handsets in a network equipment deal, like Nokia and Ericsson often did in the 1990s).

UBUNTU NOT CONTENDING

So first up, Ubuntu. The Linux based open source OS with strong African roots is celebrated by many tech fans and PC experts as an obvious choice for smartphone makers, especially those sick and tired of the Microsoft Windows dominance on the PC side, and suggesting that PC makers should feel a natural affinity to the OS. Yeah, well, you don't win by having an OS that is popular on the far smaller desktop world, else Windows would have 90% of the smartphones market. Rather, after literally a decade of trying, Microsoft's smartphone platform has managed a peak of 12% global market share and today lingers at .. 2% in annual sales. There is no 'synergy' between the desktop and the pocket. HP was the latest victim to discover this when it tried to create some synergy for Palm that it bought, using WebOS, and the world's bestselling PC brand, HP. Lenovo learned this lesson, it released its smartphones using Android instead, and in one year climbed into the Top 10 biggest smartphone makers, and now, in Q4 is ranked either 5th or 6th (racing with Sony, we have not seen Sony's numbers yet).

Ubuntu will need two big hurdles. First, it needs support by major handset makers, it should attract at least one of the Top 10 manufacturers, preferrably more than one, to have any chance. They, the handset makers, have to commit to a couple of handsets that run Ubuntu OS, and then - the most difficult hurdle, Ubuntu needs to secure carrier support where several significant carriers agree to support the new handsets using Ubuntu. This is not an impossible task but it is a huge task. The schedule for Ubuntu calls for first phones to be available about a year from now. So far, we have not seen the news that needs to happen. This is why I am not currently taking Ubuntu smartphone aspirations very seriously (yet). They have to get these deals into place, to even be 'entered into the race'. They are like someone in the Olympics, who is not even allowed to line up to the starting gate yet. Ubuntu has not qualified for this contest. They might do it, they have to hurry, but so far, they haven't.

FIREFOX VERY DARK HORSE

Then we have Firefox. The web browser company Mozilla has been working on its smartphone OS, as an open source HTML based platform, and has been making the early needed steps. ZTE, a Top 10 sized smartphone maker has announced it will introduce a Firefox based smartphone now in February at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. There is a tiny start-up smartphone maker Geeksphone of Spain who has announced two Firefox based smartphones. So there is a little bit of handset manufacturer support but the handset offering is still slim. Meanwhile, bigger hurdle, the carrier support? Thats not yet there. There is some gossip that 'a European carrier' might be interested and KDDI of Japan has said it is looking into possibly doing some Firefox in its smartphone offering, but no carrier deals yet. But Firefox has achieved 'support' by a good list of carriers such as Telefonica, TIM, T-Mobile, Sprint, Etisalat, Smart and Telenor. That is not the same as a carrier actually launching the phone and is a far cry from selling it in its stores or offering any handset subsidies to the smartphones. But Firefox does have handsets coming now, and many carriers are in discussions. Firefox could be a dark horse to have a tiny slice of this pie going into 2014. What is very much needed now, is more than one handset model by one Top 10 manufacturer.

SAILFISH (ie MeeGo 2.0 version A) PRETENDER

Jolla the Finnish start-up made of ex-Nokia staff from the killed MeeGo/Maemo project, is in a similar stage as Firefox, but on a very different trajectory. Jolla is stepping into the shoes vacated by Nokia in abandoning the hugely admired N9 and N950 smartphones running MeeGo. The N9 is the most heralded Nokia smartphone of all time and the only one that regularly beat the iPhone in side-by-side tests by major handset magazines and comparison websites. The N9 was headed to huge global success, until bizarrely the Nokia CEO decided it will not be sold in any major markets and will not be allowed to compete against the iPhone for example not being sold in the USA, UK, Germany etc. The N9 running MeeGo won the world's most prestigious technology design awards the D&AD Award in 2012, beating Apple's brand new iPad 2 among its rivals for the award. The German weekly newsmagazine Der Stern loved the N9 so much, it encouraged its readers to fly to other countries like Switzerland and Austria to buy an N9, it was that good in the magazine's opinion (yet Nokia refused to sell it in Germany??). And as Nokia refused to sell the sister phone, the N950 anywhere, only producing a very tiny run of the device, its second hand resale prices are above a thousand Euros. Nokia had a huge flagship hit product on its hands, when it had the N9 and N950 running MeeGo, yet Nokia abandoned this massive tech lead.

So enter Jolla. Jolla was formed with the help of Nokia's employee departure program and some seed funding, and took the insights and design ideas that the MeeGo/Maemo team had with the N9, N950 and other MeeGo devices, and builds upon that. Their new Sailfish OS is an evolution past MeeGo, still as an open source Linux based OS, and one could think of Sailfish as a kind of MeeGo 2.0 (version A). Sailfish is compatible with the (formerly Nokia owned) Qt application development tools and some gossip suggests the similarity between Sailfish and Android is so close, many Android apps can run natively on Sailfish. If so, Sailfish would almost overnight jump over that hurdle of 'how many apps do you have' and inherit a part in the biggest app environment that Android is now becoming, passing the iPhone App Store.

The point with Jolla is, that it is not attempting (at least initially) to be a mass market brand and platform, but rather a premium OS at the high end of the market, competing with the iPhone and Samsung Galaxy, perhaps even aiming into the price stratosphere where Vertu exists. Considering how strong the passions were for the N9 and N950, and as the N9 was the only smartphone by ANY BRAND that regularly beat the iPhone in side-by-side tests, this is not a hopeless fantasy. The Jolla staff of about a 100 employees are essentially the same as the heart of Nokia's MeeGo team. So what we will later this year see from Jolla's first smartphone(s) are what probably could have been the 'follow-up' to the N9. The first Jolla phone may well be the ultimate superphone of year 2013 and get massive attention because of that.

Then, its their business model. To price the Jolla high enough to be able to skim those profits and slice a piece of the high-end that Apple's iPhone and Samsung's Galaxy own. Jolla doesn't need to sell 10 million in the first year to be successful and become viable in the mid term. And if the Sailfish OS starts to win all sorts of comparisons vs the iPhone, soon there may be more makers joining the Sailfish family. So for Jolla, the definition of success is quite different from most others on this list. They are not even attempting a mass market play, they know from the start, they hold a premium platform and they intend to fight for the top end of the market, not the bottom end.

Which brings me to the handset partners. We just heard that Chinese smartphone maker Zopo has decided to launch smartphones on Sailfish to sell in India. Are there carriers? The first one is signed up, Finland's DNA is committed to launching Jolla's first smartphone(s) in Finland. Yes, Finland only has 5.3 million people and DNA is the smallest of the three carriers in Finland but still, this is a real live carrier deal already signed up. And you can bet your bottom dollar that fiercely patriotic Finns will flock to Jolla to buy their first-ever smartphone, if it is anywhere near as good a follow-up to the N9 as we might expect. Meanwhile about the distribution deals? China's D.Phone, the largest handset store/distributor has signed up a deal to sell Jolla's smartphones in China. As China Mobile was a partner with MeeGo, there must be at least implied support from the world's largest mobile operator/carrier who counts one out of every 8 existing mobile phone users as its customer in the world - the carrier which alone is bigger than Sprint, plus AT&T, plus Verizon, plus T-Mobile USA, combined - and doubled.

Jolla's road is not secure, Sailfish has a big task ahead of itself, but for its early steps, it has already one handset partner, it has already signed its first carrier deal and has its first independent distribution deal. The Sailfish OS is already set to launch in China and India, the two largest mobile handset markets in the world. Jolla doesn't need to achieve huge success on this path, to make a splash globally and get the attention they want, to survive into 2014 and beyond. Will Sailfish reach 1% this year or even next, probably not, but they don't need to. They know they are a niche player at the luxury end. If they can do a million per quarter, thats enough for now, then grow from there. And then, if we find someone at the bottom end of the Top 10, wanting to differentiate from Android, with a high quality OS, we could suddenly find that someone like ZTE or Lenovo or LG suddenly announce their premium line will be powered by Sailfish.. But that would look more into 2014 than 2013..

TIZEN (ie MeeGo 2.0 Version B) THE CONTENDER

There are no sure things in mobile. But Tizen is the nearest thing to a sure thing, in smartphones. Why? First, because this is the big scale relaunch of MeeGo. MeeGo was a joint project by Nokia and Nokia's past Maemo project, merged with Intel's Moblin, both Linux based open source smarpthone OS projects. So when Nokia's CEO Stephen Elop suddenly announced on 11 February that Nokia was quitting the MeeGo path to its future and selecting Windows instead (Intel's CEO was apparently informed literally on the night before the announcement! Talk about arrogance), Intel rushed to rescue the project and find a new handset partner. And if you lose the world's largest handset maker, who would you prefer to have to replace it? The second largest handset maker of course. Intel found its new partner in Samsung. The project was renamed Tizen, it now includes both Linux and HTML in its code and is still an open source OS project, of course and merges also Samsung's own in-house bada project efforts.

Samsung's bada has been a stealth success story. Many in the West are quick to dismiss it, because they haven't seen any bada smartphones in the USA or the UK.. They think it has failed. Meanwhile bada has been a considerable 'third ecosystem' success from Russia to France to India to Brazil. bada has achieved nearly 30 million cumulative sales in its first 2 years. That is more than the iPhone did in its first two years! Yes, bada is the most successful new smartphone OS launch in history! But because most of the sales were in Emerging World countries - at low price points where bada was targeted - most Western analysts have ignored bada, and often do not even mention it as a major OS rival. But let me repeat, in the first two years, bada has sold more smartphones than Apple was able to sell iPhones in its first two years. Why is this? Partly its price, but mostly its - Samsung. Samsung has the world's best carrier relationships and retail distribution now that Nokia has shot itself in the foot and Samsung has easily stepped in, smoothly taking over whatever Nokia has abandoned. Samsung has literally today the best carrier relationships and the widest distribution reach in handsets. And obviously Samsung has become the world's biggest handset maker and biggest smarpthone maker.

For Tizen, consider bada as the 'practise run'. Samsung has previously used operating systems made by others - Nokia's Symbian, Microsoft's Windows, Google's Android etc. bada was their first attempt to launch a low-end, low cost OS. bada was intended to be Samsung's own OS and they didn't try very hard to win handset manufacturer partners to join in the 'ecosystem'. This is all different with Intel now and Tizen. Intel back from the days of Moblin, and with Nokia and MeeGo, had already secured handset maker partners and Tizen's Board includes Fujitsu, NEC, Panasonic and Huawei in addition to Intel and Samsung among handset manufacturers. More critically, what of carrier support? The Tizen Board includes NTT DoCoMo, Orange, Sprint, Vodafone, Korea Telecom and SK Telecom.

These are not 'supporters' of an OS who like it and will test it or consider it. These are Board Members on the OS, who are committed to developing Tizen. The handset manufacturers cover 40% of all smartphones sold in the world (mostly currently on Android). The carriers that are represented on Tizen's Board cover 11% of the total mobile subscriber base on the planet.

If you take the technical excellence that Nokia and Intel managed to produce with the first release of MeeGo and the first two handsets, N9 and N950 (while the new Nokia CEO was torpedoing every step of the launch) - and we add two years of further development, by Intel and Samsung - Tizen is likely to be a true generational leap beyond 'the operating system considered better than iOS'. When Samsung is winning all sorts of awards with the Galaxy series, and now gets to launch its flagship OS, Tizen, you can expect the first Tizen based Samsung smartphones to be glorious. When we see that in its 'practise run' of bada, Samsung was able to sell more bada smartphones in the first two years, than Apple in its high-profile media extravaganza that was the iPhone from 2007, and now Samsung gets to take all that and do better with Tizen, expect some fireworks. And that is, before we add in Huawei, the world's third-largest smartphone maker. And we add Fujitsu and Panasonic, both past Top 10 smartphone makers from Japan who are eager to return to the world stage and make similar profits with smartphones as tech giants rivals like Samsung, LG, Apple, Lenovo etc have done recently. Samsung and Huawei have promised first Tizen phones out this year. Samsung specifically has promised multiple Tizen phones and there is a tech spec of a Galaxy version running Tizen.

The operators/carriers have frequently been saying they would welcome a third ecosystem alongside Android and the iPhone. Windows Phone cannot become that because carriers hate and fear Skype (don't argue this point, Nokia's CEO Stephen Elop himself said so to Nokia's shareholder meeting, that carriers don't like Microsoft because of Skype, adding 'of course'). Carriers also don't like Blackberry for the cannibalization of messaging by the BBM system and how RIM/Blackberry has been 'too secure' and bypassing carrier systems. Samsung and Intel understand carrier concerns - why else have six carriers joining six equipment makers on the Tizen Board? Of any new OS, Tizen is BY FAR the most carrier-friendly, and least threatening OS. Expect the carriers to warmly embrace Tizen this year and for Samsung to offer a lot of choice in its smartphones, many 'sister' devices, where they run Android or Tizen, and often carriers starting to push the Tizen variants. Again, Samsung knows now how to play this game, just this past week we heard of the Telegraph survey of UK retail, finding that when their undercover shoppers visited UK handset retailers, the most offered phones were Samsung Galaxies, even ahead of iPhones.

Like I said, there are no guarantees. If the first Tizen phones are dogs, or have severe bugs, or Samsung has some PR fiasco with carriers etc, the picture might change fast. But by current view, Tizen is set to exceed the performance of bada, and very importantly, differing from bada, Tizen to launch in all markets including the two most advanced smartphone markets, Japan and South Korea with major carrier support in both.

Tizen could hit 2% market share per quarter by the end of this year and easily rise to something like 5% market share by end of 2014. If so, Tizen would rather easily become the Third Ecosystem and then gradually grow to something near 10% in the next few years. Note, that most of Tizen's gains would come directly from Android. Still, if you remove 10% from Android's 70% now, it still leaves Google as the Gorilla of mobile, with 60% and at least 3 times bigger than number 2 (iPhone) and 6 times bigger than number 3 (Tizen). Hardly a 'threat' to Google and Android dominance.. But Tizen is likely to put an end to any hopes Blackberry or Windows have of ever becoming the third ecosystem haha..

BLACKBERRY 10 RELEGATED

BB10 is obviously not a new platform as such, its a new release of the oldest surviving platform play in smartphones. The first Blackberry smartphone came out in 2001 and all its contemporaries have died or been killed like Palm and Symbian. Windows didn't enter the smartphone wars until later in the decade. So now we've just seen BB10. The phones look new and modern, the OS looks good. But there is nothing radical, no great leap ahead. Blackberry has played catch-up and only become yet another 'me too' i-Phon-a-clone. This new fresh OS was desperately needed to stem the decline. But it, and the first 2 phones shown, is not enough to vault Blackberry back into contention for major position in smartphones. Just four years ago Blackberries had over 20% market share globally. Now the Beebee lingers at 3%. In fact, Blackberry's collapse ranks as the 7th fastest handset collapse in history. This new BB10 is no silver bullet to restore Blackberry to 20% market share or even half that. Blackberry's decline hopefully has ended. If they have good headwinds in Waterloo this year, BB might end the year near 5% market share, more likely they will be near the 3% they are today. Blackberry had its chance, it blew it by taking the eyes off the ball, and focusing its limited marketing efforts to launch the ill-fated tablet.. That chance is forever gone and Blackberry is now relegated to forever being a niche player, serving the enterprise segment of smartphones. A profitable business, no doubt, but one that is not growing as fast as the overall smartphone business.

WINDOWS PHONE 8

And what of our 'darling', WP8, which was promised by so many 'experts' to now hold something like 20% market share and was supposed to be the 'third ecosystem' and to challenge or by some 'experts' even pass the iPhone in sales, especially after Nokia joined in the 'partnership'. Yeah. That all went tits up. Windows had 12% market share in smartphones in 2007. It was down to 5% in 2010. Windows market share was down to 2% in 2011 and now that Nokia has launched 9 Lumia smartphones, supported by the world's largest smartphone launch marketing budget, joined by massive marketing suppport by Microsoft, and added to by the biggest handset launch budgets ever by some of the carriers like AT&T in the USA - what is Windows market share in smartphones now? In 2012 it was.. 2%. Windows Phone is failing comprehensively.

Nokia's CEO took Nokia's 35% market share with Symbian in 2010, and forcibly migrated it to Windows Phone. How many took this gambit? 2%. 1% is still left on Symbian as of Q4 of 2012, so 32% of Nokia's loyal customers have rather run away, taking an Android based smartphone like Samsung's Galaxy, or Apple's iPhone instead of taking the Lumia. And what of those who actually took the Lumia? The independent Yankee Group survey of customer satisfaction of USA based Lumia owners found that 4 out of 10 hated the phone so much, they rated it worst phone they've ever seen. And the brand new Bernstein loyalty survey of smartphone owners in USA and UK, found that the Windows Phone loyalty is so bad, two out of three will never buy another Windows Phone based smartphone again. The Windows Phone experiment has failed and is a dead man walking, only surviving as long as Nokia exists as a smartphone maker with Elop as its CEO (we have an Elop Firing Watch on this blog, counting down to when he is fired or Nokia itself is sold).

Almost all past Windows partners have already given up on Windows including Sony, Motorola, LG, Dell, Palm, etc - and of the last who remain, they cut their Windows offering like HTC and Samsung or postpone their first launches and cut their intended WP8 product lines like Huawei and ZTE. Most of the remaining Windows Phone 'partners' have other preferred new OS projects they now prioritize, from Tizen to Firefox. And if Nokia's CEO Elop is fired, his successor will no doubt almost instantly announce the end of Windows Phone and a shift to Android.

There are those who say 'but synergy' with Windows 8 on the desktop. Yeah. Where have we heard that before? Like with Windows Mobile. Like with Windows Phone 6. Like with Windows Phone 7. Like with Symbian - Stephen Elop when he was still at Microsoft, negotiated that 'partnership' where all Microsoft Office suite apps were made compatible with Symbian and Nokia E-Series. What good did that 'synergy' get the two tech giants? None whatsover. There probably IS some synergy from the desktop to the laptop to netbooks to tablet PCs. Yes, maybe Microsoft's Surface tablet can benefit from Windows 8 'synergy' but on smartphones we have one decade of evidence that it doesn't matter one iota. Windows has been the slowly dying operating system of smartphones, only kept alive by continued cash injections by Microsoft. All Microsoft partners who ever focused on Windows Phone have become unprofitable doing so, and only recovered to profits by abandoning the Windows path, from Sendo (bankrupted) to Motorola (bankrupted) to LG (recovered) to HTC (recovered). Windows 'life span' in smartphones continues only as long as Nokia CEO continues on his borrowed time. And as to Microsoft building its own smartphones - yeah, they tried that once before, remember Kin the world-record in market failure of a new handset launch, died in six weeks? What killed Kin was utter lack of carrier support. The carriers hate Microsoft, they fear Microsoft, they hate Skype, they don't trust Ballmer, they'd be idiots to go to bed with the company that always drives its 'partners' to bankruptcy, just like its now doing to Nokia.

So thats my view today of the upcoming newcomers to the smartphone OS races. My best wishes to all, we welcome competition and variety. But in the long run, the industry cannot sustain dozens of platforms, some will naturally disappear, like we've seen in the past with Palm, Symbian, LiMo, MeeGo etc. If I had to pick the strongest horse from this stable, I definitely have to pick Tizen. And as a Finn and ex Nokian, I do hope sincerely that Jolla and Sailfish do make a nice success out of their venture. 

PS - for those who need to have more data about the global handset industry including market shares, regional markets, average prices, installed bases, handset features etc, see my TomiAhonen Phone Book 2012

Nokia Disaster Told One Picture at a Time: Today Picture 7: When is a Platform "Burning": The Test Of CEO Sanity (alternately titled:) Is Elop Really This Delusional?

So we continue the Nokia management disaster, studied through a single issue, and single picture per blog. Today we examine management judgement by CEO Stephen Elop. So before I continue, this is a series of blog articles to study the Nokia mess.

So far we've done: the Nokia smartphone unit sales collapse due to the Elop Effect, the competitive picture of Nokia vs Apple and Samsung, Nokia market failure in context of other historical handset industry collapses, the failure of the promised migration from Symbian to Windows Phone, the disasterous Lumia sales pattern using the Windows Phone system and the Revenue Collapse in Nokia's handset business. For those who may wonder am I nit-picking some extreme data points on a personal vendetta or agenda, this is Nokia's official filing to the USA SEC and NY Stock Exchange of the full set of risks to the new strategy as announced by Elop in February 2011. I have not invented these problems, they were clearly stated by Nokia two YEARS ago as so dangerous, they may jeopardize Nokia's profitable handset business. Please read the official Nokia corporation filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission in their long and explicit risk assessment in their Form 20-F two years ago.

Now lets examine whats going on inside the head of the CEO who wants to be called 'The General' and who pretends to be a strategic thinker. Elop's name will always be tied to the most damaging management memo of all time, the so-called 'Burning Platforms' memo. A memo which cost Nokia 13 Billion dollars of revenues wiped out, and 4 Billion dollars of profits destroyed. A memo that Elop himself has since admitted, caused damage to Nokia smartphone sales. The costliest memo of all time. How can a CEO be allowed to destroy 13 Billion dollars of revenues - and wipe out 4 Billion dollars of profits - and allowed to remain in charge? Why is Elop still running Nokia. I have started an 'Elop Firing Watch' via Twitter, where my followers picked dates of when they think Elop will be fired.

WHEN IS A PLATFORM ON FIRE

So we come to today's picture. This is a picture about the mental ability of CEO Stephen 'Call Me The General' Elop. Is he really a sharp, strategic thinker. Or is he a delusional psychopath. Lets remember, delusion is a severe insanity of the kind, where a madman looks at facts, refuses to accept them, and substitues his/her own alternate imagined fantasy instead of reality.

This is Nokia's situation as of February 2011 and as of February 2012. So the data is according to the just-ended fiscal years (2010 and 2011), after Nokia has just reported its final annual results at the end of January. This is what Nokia looked like, and what Elop, the Chief Executive Officer said about his company and its smartphone business at the time:




This picture may be freely shared

On February 9, 2011, looking at the just-ended, just-reported Nokia fiscal year 2010, Nokia's new CEO sees Nokia is more than twice as big as its nearest rivals including Apple's iPhone - and Nokia grew more in 2010 than Apple so the gap between Nokia's smartphone and Apple was increasing - Apple was not catching up, Nokia was pulling away from Apple. Nokia set a world record in growth in smartphones in 2010. Nokia did this profitably - how profitably? Nokia set a Nokia-record in growth in revenues and a Nokia record in profits in its smarpthone unit - and the Nokia profitability in the smartphone unit grew towards the end of the year, setting also a Nokia quarterly growth record. Nokia's smartphone revenues were second largest in the industry behind only Apple's, and Nokia's profits were also second largest in the industry, behind only Apple's.

You are the biggest, you grow the fastest, you set a world record in growth. You do this with increasing revenues and increasing profits, both of those company-wide records. This, is what the CEO calls a strategy that is failing, and failing so badly, Nokia apparently needs desperately a new strategy, and Nokia is on a 'burning platform'. Delusion is the type insanity where you are able to look at facts, refuse to accept them, and to substitute an imagined fantasy insteady of the reality.

Then lets fast-forward 12 months. Nokia has announced the new strategy by Elop. The Nokia record-setting growth in smarpthone unit sales, turns into a world-record collapse in smartphone unit sales. Nokia proceeds to set a world record fall in smartphone revenues in that year. And Nokia produces its first-ever loss in the smartphone unit - thus a Nokia record failure in the unit that is supposed to deliver the future to Nokia.

You set an industry record crash in unit sales, an industry record collapse of revenues, and the unit that invented the smartphone and the only legacy handset maker to do profits with smartphone sales in every single quarter of smartphone existence, suddenly produces a loss. This, the CEO now says that Nokia is "no longer on a burning platform", and that "Nokia's future is secure", and Nokia is in "an era of growth". Delusion is the type insanity where you are able to look at facts, refuse to accept them, and tosubstitute an imagined fantasy insteady of the reality.

I am not making this up. Elop looked at Nokia's record-setting industry-crushing dominating year 2010 in smartphone growth, highly profitably, and sees 'distress' and 'disater' and 'failure' and panics, and abandons Nokia's winning ways, and issues his Burning Platforms memo (totally full of delusional lies by the way). Elop says that Nokia has "fallen behind" the competition and if continues on the same path (that had just grown faster than the competition) Nokia would "get further and further behind, while our competitors advance". That was February 9, 2011, two years ago.

Then yes, Nokia went to set a world record failure in handsets, Nokia fell in the next year, 2011, worse than Motorola or Palm or Siemens or RIM. Nokia literally set a world record collapse in handsets. The unit sales set a record in collapse, Nokia smartphone revenue fall is a world record, and the perennially secure profit-machine was turned upside-down to produce its first-ever loss. This, the CEO says on February 13, 2013 in an interview to Business Day that "Nokia is no longer on the edge of a burning platform" and "Nokia's future is secure" and Nokia is "facing a new era of growth."

Delusion is the type insanity where you are able to look at facts, refuse to accept them, and to substitute an imagined fantasy insteady of the reality.

ELOP WAS THE ARSONIST

The Nokia smartphone platform was not on fire in 2010. Nokia was more than twice as big as its nearest rivals - this is such enormous dominance of an industry, that Toyota has never enjoyed such a massive overpowering lead in cars. Neither has GM or Renault or Volkswagen or Fiat - ever. That dominance is so huge, Hewlett-Packard has never had the pleasure of being twice as big as its nearest PC maker rival. Nor has Dell, nor has Lenovo or IBM or Apple or Compaq or Toshiba or Acer or Asus or Fujitsu etc. But not just was Nokia twice as big as its nearest rivals - Apple's iPhone and RIM's Blackberry in smartphones, Nokia was growing more in 2010 than its nearest rivals - the gap was increasing. Nokia did this with highly profitable business, with increasing revenues and increasing profits. Towards the end of the year, when Elop took over, Nokia's smarpthone unit average sales prices jumped up at a Nokia-record, the revenues for the first time grew bigger than the traditional 'featurephones' ie 'dumbphone' unit - and the jump in Nokia's profitability set a Nokia-record. Nokia's loyalty was so strong, in an independent UK survey by Right Mobile Phone Nokia's customer base had the highest retention rate of any handset brand.

Nokia's Symbian was the bestselling smartphone OS, and it was the biggest OS by installed base, and it was the bestselling smartphone OS in China, the world's largest individual country market for smartphones, and Symbian was the bestselling smarpthone OS on the continent that sold most smartphnoes, Europe. Symbian was the bestselling smartphone in the country with the biggest growth of mobile in 2010, India, as well as the bestselling smartphone in the continent with the biggest growth of mobile, Africa. Nokia's Ovi was the second bestselling app store behind only Apple's iPhone App Store, except that Ovi was available with over 100 carriers supporting it, with apps in over 60 languages, growing far faster than Apple's iPhone App Store. Nokia's Qt was being introduced as the app developer tool to provide apps across multiple smartphone platforms including Symbian, Maemo, MeeGo Moblin, initially, and soon also Blackberry, Android as well as the featurephones running Nokia S40. Qt would shortly reach twice as many devices as the installed base of Windows on PCs, tablets, and smartphones.

This is what the CEO calls a 'burning platform' and forces Nokia to quit the winning - not winning, utterly DOMINATING strategy, and instead to select the weakest, tiniest, unproven, unloved platform by the company known for plunging its 'partners' to loss-making and bankruptcy, Microsoft. When you take a winning strategy and turn it into world-record collapse - you have set your platform on fire. You, CEO Stephen 'Call Me The General' Elop are an arsonist. There was no fire on Nokia's platform, Stephen 'Call Me the General' Elop. No. There was no fire. The platform was not burning. You set it on fire, Mr Pretend-Patton. You, and only you. Nokia's smartphone platform was the strongest in the industry in 2010, by far the most overpowering, winning, dominating strategy. 77% market share in the world's biggest smarpthone market, China! The strongest loyalty in the UK. The second-biggest app store in the world, closing in on number 1, Apple. Nokia record profits, Nokia record revenues and the world's biggest smartphone unit sale growth. There was no fire on that platform at Nokia. You took it, and set it on fire. You are a menace. You are a psycopath!

NOW WHAT OF YEAR 2012

Lets fast-forward to today. Now we have seen a second year in the Elop new strategy era. This is what the picture looks like now. Nokia has broken its own record in failure, yes, setting a new world record collapse in smarpthone unit sales, to catastrophic levels in 2012, and also set a new world record in smartphone revenue crash, and now Nokia also sets a world record loss in smartphone sales. What does the CEO think of this performance?




This picture may be freely shared

Now just over a week ago, Elop told us that he is "very encouraged" that Nokia's "execution against our business strategy" has "started to translate into financial results". Financial 'results' yes, if by results you mean not just Nokia-record losses, but handset industry record level losses. That is a 'financial result' yes, but not one that any CEO would be 'very encouraged' by, unless it is your intention to destroy Nokia?

Delusion is the type insanity where you are able to look at facts, refuse to accept them, and to substitute an imagined fantasy insteady of the reality.

In 2012, Nokia took its own world record collapse in smartphone unit failure, and managed to do even worse, setting a new world record in failure. Nokia took its record-setting revenue collapse in smartphone sales, while the global smartphone industry exploded growing over 40% in units and over 30% in revenues, and Elop managed to wipe out 55% of Nokia smartphone unit sales and 50% of Nokia smartphone revenues - from year 2011 that was already a world record setting failure year for Nokia and Elop's new strategy. The defintion of insanity is to do the same thing and to expect a different result. In 2012, Nokia took its company-record loss in the smartphone unit, and made it far worse, producing a world record loss by any smarpthone maker, in 2012.

Nokia's new Lumia smartphones running the Windows Phone by Microsoft, are the worst smartphones Nokia has ever launched. With the last edition of Symbian, a new launch of a new version of Symbian did 5 million units in one quarter in Q4 of 2010. Now with these new Lumia smarpthones, after 5 quarters, Nokia has yet to even match that in any quarter, the very best that Lumia has managed is a paltry 4.4 million units - five quarters after launch - while the smartphone market has more than doubled in size in the mean time. The Lumia series is plagued with failures and problems and bugs. The Lumia buyers hate the devices so much, in an independent survey of Lumia buyers by Yankee Group in 2012, four out of ten Lumia buyers rated it the worst phone they had ever seen. The loyalty of the Windows Phone series is so bad, the Bernstein survey of smartphone brand loyalty found that two out of three who were hoodwinked into buying a Lumia, hate it so much, they will definitely never buy another Windows Phone smarpthone again! 

The Lumia series has the hightest return rates of any phone made by Nokia ever (customer returning phones after purchase). The Lumia series has the lowest resale value of any Nokia phone ever released, in many markets the resale value is already zero. It may amuse American readers but yes, in Africa, India, Indonesia, Brazil, China, much of the rest of the world, handsets are sold second-hand, like cars. Your resale value is a significant factor in how much you are willing to pay for your new phone, especially as most people live in countries where phones are not subsidised by the carriers and sold on 2 year contracts. Consumers pay full retail prices for their handsets, ie the real price of an iPhone is 640 dollars, not the 179 dollars that AT&T advertises on a 2 year contract. Back to Lumia, the European carriers for example said, that the Lumia series is not suitable for European consumers, and the carriers have effectively boycotted Lumia sales from the start. The very latest survey by the Telegraph in the UK this past week found that in-store sales staff won't offer Lumias to customers asking for smartphones, they offer Samsung Galaxies instead.

The Windows ecosystem is dead, it is the sixth of six, literally the smallest in existence. It has not been growing, it has been shrinking. The Windows ecosystem has a modest catalog of apps primarily because Nokia was paying app developers to build Windows versions of their apps (and so did Microsoft too, offer payments when developers simply refused to bother to develop apps to the tiny ecosystem). The traffic generated by Windows Phone apps is so miniscule it doesn't register on most measurements, while ironically, Symbian still runs biggest or second biggest app environment on the three most populous of the six inhabited continents.

Elop looks at record failing Nokia smartphone unit sales, record collapsing Nokia smartphone revenues, and hideously huge losses - for the full year the Nokia smarpthone unit generated a 2 Billion dollar loss, at one point in Q3 when pushing the Lumia series very hard, Nokia was making a 49% loss per smartphone sold! This compares to a 2 Billion dollar profit Nokia made just before this mad Microsoftian misadventure that Elop calls a new strategy. Elop sees collapsing sales, record-setting revenue crash and massively growing 2 billion dollar loss - and he says he is "very encouraged" that his strategy is now succeeding? That his strategy has "started to translate into financial results" Delusion is the type insanity where you are able to look at facts, refuse to accept them, and to substitute an imagined fantasy insteady of the reality.

WHAT DOES DELUSIONAL CEO DO?

Can a CEO be this mad? How can Nokia's Board accept the management of a madman? Why is Nokia led by the leadership of a lunatic? This is what happens if a delusional psycopath is in charge:

Nokia invented the smartphone and the first Nokia smartphone had a full QWERTY keyboard. Nokia's business-oriented E-Series on Symbian was renown for its wide range of QWERTY keyboards and the heavily texting-addicted youth were often selecting Nokia QWERTY based smartphones. About one in three Nokia smartphones sold globally have had QWERTY keyboards historically. Elop admits to having had 'internal debates' about QWERTY. The Lumia series has introduced 9 devices so far, not one of them has a physical QWERTY keyboard in any form factor. Elop has voluntarily abandoned one third of Nokia's loyal custoemr base with this one moronic move. Only a delusional psycopath looks at facts, is able to actively ignore the truth, and subtitute his own hallucination in the place of reality.

Nokia announces the new superphone the N9 with MeeGo. The press love the phone. After Nokia's share price has been in free-fall for five months, suddenly on the N9 news, Nokia's share price jumps 5%. Any sane CEO would celebrate and be seen everywhere with the new superphone. Elop announces to Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat, that no matter how well the N9 will sell, Nokia will not release more phones to run on MeeGo. WTF ? Can you see Steve Jobs ever saying something that moronic? Can you see Steve Ballmer - hardly a rocket scientist among CEOs, himself listed as one of the worst CEOs in the world - but would Ballmer say, that if the next Xbox is a success, he won't do more of them? What CEO takes a highly praised product, and kills its future? Only a delusional CEO can do that.

Nokia's traditional stregth is the camera. Nokia's own internal surveys reveal, year after year, that the camera is the number 1 reason what Nokia smartphone buyers want when buying a Nokia branded smartphone. Nokia has had a 12 megapixel flagship smarpthone since 2010 and on Symbian, introduces the industry-shattering 808 Pureview with its 41 megapixel monster-sensor in 2012. And once again, Nokia itself says in 2012, that yes, Nokia customers number 1 request is the camera. Nokia wins best cameraphone year after year after year in survey after survey, from the N93 to the N95 to the N9 to the 808 Pureview. Yet the delusional CEO looks at the facts, and decides he has a better imaginary reality inside his head, and he regresses, releasing puny 8 megapixel cameras on THREE SUCCESSIVE flagships on the Lumia series. So bad, that even in 2012, the old 2010 Symbian based flagship N8 wins in side-by-side camera tests (and the N8 still registers in December 2012, among the top 5 bestselling Nokia smartphones sold in China for example when the phone is literally more than 2 years old and 9 newer Lumia phones have been released)

Nokia's biggest rival is Samsung. Samsung competes against top end smartphones, in mid-priced featurephones and in low-cost dumbphones. Samsung is the only rival to match up to Nokia in every country and in most markets Samsung and Nokia were numbers 1 and 2 back in 2010. When Elop wrote his Burning Platforms memo, Nokia was 50% bigger than Samsung in dumbphones and 4x bigger in smartphones. Elop in his memo lists many competitors - including Google who is perhaps Microsoft's rival, but as Google didn't make handsets, smartphones nor networking equipment, Google was not in any way Nokia's significant rival in 2010. But Elop ignored Samsung? Then in February 2011, when Elop was asked about Samsung, he said, he does not lose any sleep over Samsung !!! At that very moment, Samsung passed Nokia as the world's biggest handset maker. It had already passed Nokia as the world's biggest smartphone maker. Today Samsung is 6 times bigger than Nokia in smartphones and produces the second largest profits in handsets, behind only Apple. Elop said he didn't lose any sleep over Samsung. Delusion is the type insanity where you are able to look at facts, refuse to accept them, and to substitute an imagined fantasy insteady of the reality.

Nokia's MeeGo based 'Searay' handset is selected by Verizon as their Nokia return handset. Verizon love MeeGo and the Searay. Nokia has for years hoped to return to the US market. Any sane CEO would tell Verizon, you will get it. But Elop? He refuses to let Verizon get the Searay, and rather bastadizes the Searay, forces it to use Windows Phone - and when Verizon see the Lumia 800, they say no way. Nokia lose a year of Verizon sales. Only a delusional CEO can behave like this.

Nokia's N9 is released in September 2011 and immediately achieves in side-by-side tests, the astonishing rating by practically all tech tests, that it is better than the iPhone !!! There has never been a Nokia smarpthone that regularly beats the iPhone (the E90 Communicator was the last Nokia smartphone to manage it but only occasionally, not consistently). This is not just the only Nokia smartphone consistently ranked better than the iPhone, it is the ONLY smartphone by ANY BRAND to do that consistently. Also the MeeGo OS is rated superior to the iPhone iOS - something Windows, Blackberry, Android, Symbian etc have never achieved. So any reasonable CEO of course would rush to launch the N9 to every strong iPhone market like the USA, France, UK, etc. What does Elop do? He forbids the release of the N9 to any strong iPhone markets? Remember, this is at the time when Nokia is setting global records for smarpthone sales collapse and producing massive losses, with its factories idling. The N9 is a highly profitable smarpthone commanding premium prices. What idiot CEO refuses to let the N9 be sold? Only a delusional psycopath can look at the facts - that the new Nokia N9 is better than the iPhone - and then explicitly forbid its sale in any market where the iPhone is strong. What is wrong with Elop? 

THe 808 Pureview is released in February 2012 and its demand highly exceeds Nokia production. The 808 Pureview instantly is heralded as the best cameraphone of all time. The 808 Pureview runs on Symbian using traditional Nokia strengths, and has lots of abilities and features that Windows Phone cannot support. The smart CEO would take the high popularity and visibility of the 808 Pureview, and rush to release a series of Pureview smarpthones, the 818 Pureview with QWERTY slider. the 707 Pureview with a slightly smaller sensor like 22 megapixels, but stll far bigger than any current rivals. And for Christmas 2012, produce the uberphone, the 909 Pureview with a 50 megapixel sensor, and optical zoom. Right? Nokia itself admits, the demand for the Pureview was far higher than Nokia anticipated. This is a hit phone! It won all awards in 2012 for best cameraphone. And most Nokia customers came in asking for a good camera. Any smart CEO would have produced a family of Pureview with Symbian, especially as Nokia factories are idling and Elop himself promised 150 million more Symbian while he has only delivered 74 million so far. And with no royalties paid to anyone, Nokia can do Symbian far cheaper than for example Lumia where Nokia has to pay a royalty to Microsoft. If the 808 Pureview was a failure, it makes sense to end it. If the Pureview is in such high demand Nokia can't keep up, any sane CEO would rush a series of sister products. But not Elop. Nokia now announced there will be no more Symbian based smarpthones, even as Windows Phone cannot support nearly all the features that make the 808 Pureview the best cameraphone on the planet.

Delusion is the type insanity where you are able to look at facts, refuse to accept them, and to substitute an imagined fantasy insteady of the reality.

I could go on and on and on and on. Nokia's CEO is delusional. He looks at Nokia performance and cannot relate to it. He does not see success as success, he seems to want to destroy any success he finds. Elop is to success what water is to fire. Elop found the strongest smartphone global juggernaut, and set it on fire like an arsonist. He then looks at the disasterous failure and calls it a success. Elop is dangerous as a CEO, not dangerous to his rivals, dangerous to his own employees, to his own Board, to his own shareholders and investors. Why is a delusional psycopath allowed to remain in control of Nokia?

For those who didn't like my little clown-faces, I have created a cleaner version of the picture. If you want to write about this story and use my pictures, you may prefer this one, haha. Feel free.




This picture may be freely shared

This was part 7 in the Nokia disaster. Elop has presided over the world-record collapse of a dominating juggernaut. Elop is literally the worst CEO of all time. Unfortunately this series is nowhere nearly done, I will return with more articles in the series, always one picture and one angle to the mess that did not exist before Elop, but what was caused by Elop.

(I need to point out, Nokia was in trouble before Elop, yes, Nokia corporation, not Nokia smarpthones. Nokia had trouble with 'execution' not its smartphones strategy. Nokia needed help in execution, delivering new phones on time and without bugs. Elop did not address those - his new Lumia phones have been plagued with more errors and bugs than any Nokia phones ever before, including the notorious N97. What Elop did, was to see that there was a problem, ignored it, and created a new problem. Its like a doctor, who arrives at an accident scene, sees that a patient has lost a leg and the leg needs to be cleaned and properly amputated. Then the doctor rather than attending the leg, decides to cut off an arm from the patient.. Elop has found problems at Nokia, ignored those, but created new problems of his own - wait, this is EXACTLY like Elop, the Delusional Psycopath)

Stay tuned, more troubles coming from the Nokia saga told one picture at a time. And for those who missed it, we have an 'Elop Firing Watch' on the blog, a contest to guess what date is Elop fired from Nokia. (that date cannot come too soon, and will probably be named a national holiday in Finland, haha) The contest has over 100 entries..

Countdown to Mobile Moment - When Will Mobile Phone Accounts Outnumber Humans? I say July 2013 (we are at 6.7B already)

So its that monster year not just in mobile and tech, but in human history. We will experience the Mobile Moment this year, 2013. The moment in time when human evolution reaches the point, where a single consumer gadget exceeds the total human population by users. So we are now counting down to yes, the moment when mobile phone accounts, or 'subscriptions' or some may say 'users' or 'mobile phones' will exceed the total human population alive. Not measured in household penetration rates, nor of adults, but measured in total humans alive.

Never in human history has any gadget or technology achieved 100% penetration levels. Not cars, not motorbikes and mopeds, not even bicycles. Not the Walkman, not the CD player, not the television, Playstation, VCR, DVD player nor even radio. Not the PC, not the internet. Not even such basic necessities we all expect, like running water or electricity. The wristwatch may have seemed ubiquitous, but it wan't. It never reached every wrist. The pen and paper technology, basic pencils, do not reach the total human population because still 800 million adults on the planet are illiterate and have no use for such a technology. But even illiterate humans, beyond the reach of electricity are using mobile phones today. (yes in many parts of Africa and Asia and Latin America, schools provide free recharging service for mobile phones, as an incentive to have the parents send the kids to schoo. and get their phones recharged, for those living in villages and farms that don't have electricity)

But mobile. Mobile reached 6.7 Billion active accounts/subscriptions last year by December 2012, and grew from a little over 6 Billion, adding over 650 million new accounts ie grew new paying users by 11% in just one year. (Isn't this an awesome industry, the fastest-growing Trillion-dollar industry in human history, and the epicenter of all digital convergence). And how, this year, we will definitely add at least another 600 million, probably even more than that. So this is the historic year, when we will have the 'Mobile Moment'. A gadget or technology will grow to become bigger than total human population. Mobile accounts already are bigger than the populations of Europe, Oceania, Latin America, the Middle East and even North America. Asia is almost at 100% and Africa will reach 100% penetration rate level well before this decade is done (they are already past 70% penetration rate). Leading countries are past 200% like the UAE and Hong Kong.

So now we are on the countdown to the Mobile Moment. When will it happen? My current projections say it will happen in July of 2013. The planet is at 7.07 Billion humans and we are at 6.71 Billion mobile subscriptions now in January 2013. We are growing new mobile accounts at a rate of about 54 million per month.

Now, remember, the total mobile subscription count is not the same as actual mobile phones in use (that is less, as some will have multiple accounts but use one phone, and do the SIM-card-switch between different carriers/operators to save in costs or optimize in telecoms traffic behavior). Also remember, because some of us have two phones, and others who have one phone have more than one account, and as some of the mobile accounts are actually machine-accounts (electric meters, watering irrigation systems, healthcare warning systems etc) the actual number of 'unique users' as human beings is well below that magical number. But these are the numbers at the end of 2012:

MOBILE SUBCRIBERS, PHONES, AND USERS AT END OF 2012
Planet . . . . . . . . . . 7.1 Billion humans
Mobile accounts . . . 6.7 Billion total active subscriptions (94% of all humans)
Phones in use . . . .  5.2 Billion including those with 2 phones (73% of all humans)
Unique users . . . . . 4.3 Billion humans who have at least one phone and account (60% of all humans)
Source: TomiAhonen Almanac 2013
This data may be freely shared

Lets see as the numbers start to come in. I expect some analysts to jump on the mobile moment number earlier, and also, that as we'll hit the 7.0 Billion active accounts number before technically passing human population count at almost 7.1 Billion, we may see the seven billion number celebrated around May or June.

But yes, this is the monster number coming this year. It will be widely reported and a lot of pundits will give their commentary on fhis pervasive technology. So a few quick thoughts - most of those phones in use are not smartphones (only 1.1 Billion were at the end of last year). The number 1 used service on those mobile devices is no longer voice calls, it is SMS text messaging. More than two out of three phones in use is a cameraphone so for most humans on the planet, the only camera they have ever used, was on a phone, not a stand-alone Canon or Nikon or Olympus haha..

As to services, more than a third of these mobile phone users access the internet on their phones at least part of the time and nearly a third access news on their phones. 60% of mobile phone owners have received advertising on their phones already so mobile is becoming the biggest advertising platform by reach, totally dwarfing television, print and the PC based legacy internet, and rivalled only by radio anymore. And yes, obviously, all data in this blog may be freely shared and re-used and translated and turned into infographics etc.. Please provide links back here if you do and also tell me via Twitter - I am @tomiahonen of course - and I'll tweet links to your articles that talk about these numbers.

I'll be giving you a lot more data on the mobile industry as we near the publication date for the brand new TomiAhonen Almanac 2013 edition, but if you wanted all the mobile data in an ebook/mbook that you can save on your tablet, laptop or smartphone - now's the time to order the TomiAhonen Almanac 2012. Anyone who buys the old edition now, gets the new edition also, for the same low price of ony 9.99 Euros. A great value on the 180 page statistical compendium of all major mobile industry stats. So check out the TomiAhonen Almanac 2012.

 

The Seven Biggest Collapses in Mobile Handset or Smartphone History - this is part 3 in the Nokia Disaster analysis series

I started last week with a long analysis series of the individual problems relating to the Nokia mess. Each article will deal only with one aspect of Nokia's current malaise and will include a picture to explain it. I am trying to keep the articles short and readable. If you want to read what Nokia itself identified as the risks to the new Windows strategy, the risks were all itemized in the official filing Nokia did to the USA Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the New York Stock Exchange, using the form 20-F. I visited some of those risks and how much the nightmare scenario has in fact come true under Elop in the past two years. Then I started this series of short single-issue blogs. First I showed how Nokia growth had turned instantly into collapse in February 2011, and then I wrote about Nokia vs Competitors. But this is a blog about just one topic today. The world record in market collapse in the handset industry.

So I did the math for you, and collected the seven biggest collapses in the handset industry, so we can see how Nokia's smartphones now in 2010-2012 under Elop, compare to previous bankruptcy-resulting disasters that forced the company or unit to be sold - Motorola, Palm, Siemens - and the equivalent total failure of Windows Mobile (replaced with no migration path by Windows Phone). And the two that survived their big scares, LG (definitely survived) and RIM (the jury is still out, but currently most think the worst is over). Thats our context, the six worst market failures ever. I will compare all seven, including Nokia where the starting point is harmonized. This is the 'clean' version of the graphic. I will provide one detailed variant, same graph, but with the seven reasons why, at the end of this blog. Use whichever you like (or both) if you feel like writing or speaking about this set of notorious mobile industry collapses.






This graphic may be freely shared 


First a few notes about the graph. The metric is market share. As the industry growth per year has fluctuated greatly from one year to another, as we faced two global economic crises in the past 12 years that faced zero growth (by some measures even slight market decline year-on-year) the best measure to compare collapses in different periods is the market share metric. Also the starting point is very different, Nokia started at 35%, Motorola at 21% compared to the collapse of Palm and LG which started at 9% and Siemens at 8%. So I have harmonized the starting point to year zero. At Year Zero, the starting point of Nokia at 35% market share in 2010, is harmonized to Siemens in 2001 having 8% or RIM in 2009 having 19%.

Then I have used the fall in market share points, converted to a standardized rate of annual decline - counting from starting point to ending point, by number of years. So when Siemens fall from 8% to 2% in a three-year period, that means Siemens market share collapsed by 3 out of 4 it had (ie 75% as a rate of total fall). In other words, Siemens fell in half in 18 months, and in half again, in the next 18 months. Its average rate of decline per year was thus 35%.

Or Windows Mobile which started at 12% in 2008 and after the period was down to also only one fourth the size it started with, ie 3%. But Microsoft's smartphone operating system achieved that fall of being cut in half, in 12 months, not 18 months, and again in the next 12 months. So WinMo also lost 3 out of 4 market share points it had - but did it only in two years, compared to Siemens who did the same damage in three years. So Microsoft's average annual rate of collapse was 50% per year. 

Finally, note that these are not strictly apples-to-apples comparisons, this worst-of-handsets record holders notorious list includes pure smartphone makers RIM and Palm; full-feature handset makers in the time to shift to smartphones Motorola and LG; a full-feature handset maker Siemens when the smartphone market was in its infancy and of no significance to the fall; a pure smartphone OS provider Microsoft Windows Mobile; and of the Nokia fall, this is only of its smartphone unit, which when this fall started, had become Nokia's biggest revenue unit and obviously generated more revenues than its dumbphone unit. So please note, this is not a measure of 'all Nokia mobile phones' including dumbphones/featurephones. This is purely the smartpone unit where Nokia's future - and the future of the industry - lies.

With all that, lets examine each of the seven to see how they fell, when they did it, and why. Here are the Seven Worst Collapses in the history of mobile phone handsets, and their stories:

LG - 2008-2011 - FELL FROM 9% TO 4% IN 3 YEARS - AVERAGE FALL 24% PER YEAR: SURVIVED
(Was ranked number 3 in market of all mobile phone handsets)
Cause of collapse - Microsoft partnering

At number 7 we have LG with its ill-fated Microsoft misadventure. In 2008 LG was growing strong had grabbed 9% market share in mobile phones globally, was the number 3 bestselling phone in the USA, number 4 in Europe and seeing strong growth fuelled in part by its iconic LG Prada series of featurephones that in 2007 had outsold the similar-appearance 'original' Apple iPhones (what were later to be called iPhone 2G ie the featurephone before Apple turned the iPhone into a proper smartphone starting with iPhone 3) worldwide.

LG made the always-costly mistake of a deep partnership with Microsoft, and where most legacy handset-maker rivals used either Symbian or Android very successfully, to battle the rapidly growing iPhone and Blackberry at this time (2008), LG decided to rather partner deeply with Microsoft and believed the marketing BS that Windows Mobile would win over the iPhone (and Blackberry). The Windows market share went into deep dive the more Microsoft's product was obviously not competitive against iOS and Symbian (such as Nokia N-Series) in the consumer markets, Blackberry OS and Symbian (ie Nokia E-Series) in the enterprise markets. LG was then burned by Microsoft suddenly 'Osborning' the whole Windows Mobile line - announcing it will be terminated, and a new incompatible platform would be built on Windows Phone instead. This was soon after LG had joined as the strategic partner to Windows. LG lost a little over half its market share in all phones as the vital top-end flagship phones were utterly unsellable, and LG went from profits into deep losses. LG rapidly abandoned the doomed Microsoft path, and joined the Android family to great additional cost and delay, but LG survived the damage, and today is back to profits.

RIM - 2009-2012 - FELL FROM 19% to 5% IN 3 YEARS - AVERAGE FALL 34% PER YEAR: SURVIVES
(Was ranked number 2 in market of smartphones)
Cause of collapse - entering tablet market as pure handset maker

Blackberry-maker RIM saw promising profitable growth in 2008 as it battled the new iPhone (yes, thats true, RIM was not in any way damaged by the strong growth years of Apple, RIM was essentially immune, serving the most opposite distinct market: where the iPhone served affluent consumers interested in web surfing and later, apps; Blackberries served enteprise/business users and their emails and in consumer markets, the youth addicted to messaging). RIM management in Waterloo then embarked on the disasterous market exploration that all but destroyed the iconic Canadian smarpthone maker. They decided to try to do a tablet PC. I've explained on this blog many times, that a tablet PC makes perfect sense for any PC maker (like HP, Dell, Acer, or yes, Apple or Sony or Samsung) but it does not make any sense for a pure handset maker like Motorola or RIM (or as now rumors suggest, Nokia). The tablet market is vastly different, tablets are sold and priced differently than PCs. The tablet market is far smaller than smartphones, and dominated by Apple's iPad. An intelligent smartphone manufacturer CEO will resist the temptation just because superficially, on its appearance, a tablet looks like an enlarged smartphone. The smartphone market is fiercely competitive, regularly half of the big manufacturers report losses in the smartphone market even as the market grows at breakneck speeds usually more than 50% per year. The smart CEO focuses efforts to win and keep on winning in the far bigger smartphone market, and explores new smartphone opportunities but leaves the tablet PC market to the legacy PC makers who have to move there anyway as their own desktop PC market is stagnating.

Well, RIM obviously did not listen to my advice and right as they were stretched to the limit in supporting their global expansion marketing in smartphones - as Blackberries very bizarrely became the bestselling smartphones in unanticipated countries at the time like Thailand, Venezuela, South Africa, Nigeria etc - RIM actually admitted in public, the consumer love of the Blackberry took them by surprise and they didn't really know even fully why it was the bestselling smarpthone in such differing markets. Instead of learning why it is growing strongly in so many large emerging world markets, RIM took the eye off the ball, and launched an iPad competitor instead, now forcing most of its marketing effort to go into launching RIM into the PC market where it had never competed, on that distribution, sales, pricing etc market. The Blackberry tablet failed and drained massively RIM resources, forcing it to retrench globally from the growing consumer market, and into the receeding corporate market (where BYOD Bring Your Own Device policies were now allowing iPhones and Android smartphones to eat into RIM's traditionally 'safe' enterprise market).

Worst of all, the efforts into the launch of the Blackberry tablet drained precious software development skills needed for the next generation Blackberry OS, the one with full touch integration, that we now know as BB!0, that is scheduled for first handsets out this first calendar Quarter in 2013. The BB10 project was critical to keep Blackberry competitive, and any delays to BB10 would severely drain RIM's growth and market prospects. As RIM cut staff and costs fierecely in the Blackberry tablet launch disaster aftermath, the BB10 project got postponed and postponed again. However, RIM survived (or is surviving) but just barely. Last year saw a lot of rumors of RIM going bankrupt or being bought.

SIEMENS - 2001-2004 - FELL FROM 8% TO 2% IN THREE YEARS - AVERAGE FALL 35% PEAR YEAR: SOLD THE HANDSET UNIT
(Was ranked number 4 in market of mobile phone handsets)
Cause of death - market shirt from enterprise to consumer handsets (killed by Nokia)

Siemens was the first big casualty of a Top 5 manufacturer to die in digital age of consumer cellular phones. Siemens missed the big shift from enterprise oriented 'business phones' to the much larger consumer market. Siemens's phones tended to be quite technical and capable, but big and bulky and ugly and unfriendly to users. Where Nokia focused on consumer fashions and interests (replaceable colored covers, downloadable ringing tones) and made consumer services and features more easy to use (adding the clock and games, and making all Nokia phones very easy to use on SMS text messaging, adding a big phone number library capacity etc) Siemens missed those trends and found its high capacity in phones falling into loss-making and under-utilized. Siemens sold its handset unit to BenQ.

MOTOROLA - 2006-2009 - FELL FROM 21% TO 5% IN THREE YEARS - AVERAGE FALL 41% PER YEAR: BANKRUPTED AND SOLD
(Was ranked number 2 in market of mobile phone handsets)
Cause of death - iPhone and Nokia N-Series stole top end market of Razr

Motorola was enjoying the windfall gains of being Nokia's biggest rival, when the global carrier community decided to punish Nokia the last time for severe disgressions (These were the 2003 launch of the consumer-oriented smartphone Nokia N-Gage with its nasty concept of 'app store' that allowed apps to be sold and downloaded to N-Gage smartphones by 'sideloading' ie bypassing the carriers and their billing and traffic; plus the coincidentially timed Nokia push to the early version of Nokia's consumer marketing afforts around Club Nokia. The carrier community revolt caused Nokia to see global market share loss of a third in a two-year period).

This timing was very fortuitous for Motorola, timed with the launch of the Razr series, at the time the sleekest most sexy-looking featurephones on the market in 2004-2006. Powered by the Razr, the severely declining Motorola handset sales turned into strong growth over those two years (matched by almost exact decline in Nokia sales). After Nokia made peace with the carrier community in 2006 and withdrew the hated N-Gage and refocused Club Nokia to be delivered via the carrier networks - Nokia was able to recover completely. But why did Motorola now suddenly lose its share (and others did not for example Samsung etc).

Motorola's Razr was the first big scalp taken by the iPhone. In those markets where Apple was strong, mostly the USA and Europe - markets where Motorola also was usually strong - the slick sexy iPhone stole Motorola's lollipop and ran away with it. But in other markets, where Motorola also was strong but the iPhone was not to be seen, like China, Latin America and the Middle East (and parts of Europe too) - it was in fact Nokia's N-series, in particular the hugely popular Nokia N95 (a smartphone that vastly outsold the iPhone by the way) that destroyed Razr's markets. Motorola was then still in that typical USA-mindset thinking of smartphones as primarily enterprise-oriented ie business phones and made several smartphone design mistakes including ill-fated Windows based smartphones that failed to succeed right as the iPhone was proving to the USA market what Nokia had already years before proven to European and Asian markets - that the consumer market for smarpthones was far bigger. What focus Motorola did in 2008 and 2009 was into the wrong market segment (enterprise) and on the wrong platform (Windows). Motorola went from huge profits to massive losses in the collapse and then retrenched from markets, and tried to survive by shrinking such as selling its networking unit to Nokia. Motorola did not survive, went bankrupt, was split, and the handset unit was sold to Google.

PALM - 2005-2008 - FELL FROM 9% TO 2% IN THREE YEARS - AVERAGE FALL 42% PER YEAR - SOLD
(was ranked number 2 in market of smartphones)
Cause of death - iPhone

Palm was the second largest smartphone maker in the world behind Nokia, running also the second-most used smarpthone OS behind Symbian. Palm became purely a victim of the iPhone in 2007 and being in essentially the same markets where Apple is strong, especially the USA, and with poor carrier support even there, Palm died very fast. It did join the Windows ecosystem in an attempt to fight back, but that only drained further the funds Palm had and caused more headaches Palm didn't need, which meant its own radical and many felt possibly even iPhone-beating OS, WebOS, being severely delayed. Palm had focused on the enterprise market when the laggard US market finally followed the trends we had seen in Europe and advanced countries of Asia-Pacific to the consumer market, so Palm's response to the early iPhone was misunderstanding it and not reacting to it appropriately. Palm had never been strong in profits, was making ever bigger losses as its market share collapsed and lingered on for a while generating ever more losses in the 1% market share range before being bought by HP (and since, terminated, but possibly parts of what was Palm now might be resurrected via WebOS, as HP re-examines its interests in mobile)

WINDOWS MOBILE - 2008-2010 - FELL FROM 12% TO 3% IN ONLY TWO YEARS - AVERAGE FALL 50% PER YEAR - WAS TOTALLY REPLACED BY WINDOWS PHONE
(Was ranked number 2 in market of smartphone operating systems)
Cause of death - iPhone and Osborning of the Windows Mobile line

Microsoft's Windows is a kind of widow-maker in smarpthones. Its launch (Windows's ie Microsoft's launch I mean) itself resulted in killing the mother it was supposed to have, British smartphone maker Sendo. Microsoft plundered all the insights from Sendo, then went to another 'partner' it had, HTC, and instead launched Windows with HTC instead. Sendo claimed in the lawsuit (that it won) that Windows had been stealing Sendo intellectual property which it used to help HTC. Of the biggest failures on this list, most had decisive or contributing damage from attempting a Microsoft cure to their troubles. Windows is to winning in smartphones like water is to fire. LG, Motorola, Palm and Nokia on this list have felt damage from attempting a Microsoft cure. Note - nobody has ever used Windows to gain significant sustainable share in smartphones. Even HTC shifted away from Windows to Android the moment that became possible and HTC had at that time sold half of all Windows phones ever made.

Well, Microsoft did collect at one point six of the ten largest smartphone makers (Samsung, HTC, LG, SonyEricsson, Palm, Motorola) to support Windows but that didn't help. Every one of the major smartphone makers complained, some more openly than others, that Microsoft was always the worst partner they had seen in the smarpthone market, whether saying that explicitly, or indicating it via their emphasis by product portfolio, or complaining that consumers and carriers didn't prefer this platform. Every one of these makers had supported at least one other smartphone platform (Symbian, Android, Palm, LiMo) and those who ever attempted to prioritize Windows ahead of the others (LG, Motorola, Palm) had found the company immediately going from profits to losses, or the losses only becoming bigger, after Microsoft's Windows versions had been launched. HTC on the other hand, struggled with losses until it found profits out of Android..

The ultimate irony is, that after six years of pretty steady growth for Windows Mobile, it suddenly 'went over the cliff' and fell by a then-world-record fall in the handset industry, losing 50% per year on average, for two years, collapsing from 12% to 3% in yes, 24 months. Windows Mobile collapse was due almost exactly due to the iPhone, as WinMo's significant markets were almost exactly those where Apple's iPhone was growing strongly in 2008 and 2009. Whereas Windows Mobile had seemed reasonably competitive in 2006 against its then-rivals Symbian, Palm, Blackberry OS and Linux Mobile, once the iPhone appeared, Windows Mobile was instantly obsolete. It could not even take advantage of advanced features that Symbian supported, such as multiple screens, genuine multitasking, advanced cameras, advanced screen resolutions etc. Where Symbian (and Blackberry OS) did just fine during early iPhone market rise, Windows Mobile (and Palm OS) utterly collapsed.

Why Windows Mobile collapse turned so severe, 50% per year compared to its close compatriot Palm OS that only fell 42% per year - was the Osborning of Windows Mobile by Steve Ballmer. In a bizarre twist on history, compared to Microsoft under Bill Gates who provided a migration path from DOS to Windows on the PC side, that ensured Microsoft's giant market share edge on the basic text-based DOS personal computers would be held as the market transitioned to the modern mouse-input-based Windows environment; why didn't Microsoft do the same from Windows Mobile to Windows Phone? Windows Mobile was the smartphone equivalent of DOS, a mostly text-based input (or stylus) but after the iPhone, we've seen the touch-based input that Windows Phone epitomizes. If Steve Ballmer had offered a migration path from Windows Mobile to Windows Phone, rather than Osborning the whole Windows world, he might well have kept 10% or 8% of the Windows market for today (Windows Phone currently has about 2% market share).

Also just for those who don't know, the Osborne Effect is when a provider promises a new platform in the future, incompatible with the current ones, but does not have those new items to sell now. All current sales collapse as obsolete. This bankrupted the Osborne Computer company, and Ballmer Osborned his Windows Mobile platform which pushed the speed of collapse to a world record. Yes, in only 2 years, Microsoft's market share in smartphone operating systems fell from number 2 to number 6, his market share collapsed from 12% to 3% and this was the world record collapse in the mobile handset industry. Windows Mobile did not survive this transition, it was completely replaced (by a new OS, Windows Phone that is such a poor replacement that it has not peaked above 3% in any single quarter since its release in 2010) 

NOKIA - 2010-2012 - FELL FROM 35% to 5% in TWO YEARS - AVERAGE FALL 62% PER YEAR - IS CURRENTLY ENDANGERED SPECIES AS FALL CONTINUES 
(Was ranked number 1 in market of smartphones)
Cause of death - Elop Effect ie Osborne Effect combined with Ratner Effect - resulted in instant carrier boycott and retail boycott against Nokia, these furher damaged by another Osborne Effect by Elop and yet another by Ballmer, and the purchase of Skype by Microsoft causing a Microsoft-targeted sales boycott

Nokia invented the smarpthone so it started with 100% market share. It is predictable that Nokia would see market share erosion, gradually, over time, as the market drew new competitors, as happens with any new market. The Nokia average rate of market share decline had been historically be about 4% or 5% per annum, and guess what it was in 2010? Exactly to form, in year 2010, Nokia market share (annually) fell from 39% to 35% ie a fall of 4% in market share points (incidentially, there was some shenanigans with that, Nokia's previous CEO was caught buying market share ie boosting it by artificial prices that cut profits severely, an unsustainable problem which was part of why he was fired in the summer of 2010). Obviously Nokia's annual market share erosion was so mild, it would not register in this Top 7, in fact nowhere near the Top 10 biggest falls in handsets.

This quite gradual and modest decline in market share was suddenly boosted in 2011. To say boosted is an understatement. The floor fell off. Nokia set a world record by suddenly collapsing smartphone sales by 62% per year, for two years running. Note, this has nothing to do with the iPhone. The iPhone grew its market in the early years of the iPhone from 2007 to 2009 at a time when Nokia's smartphone sales grew more than Apple's. Since then, the iPhone sales stabilized and grew barely faster than the industry on a whole. Nokia's fall didn't start until after the iPhone's growth period had ended.

Something very drastic happened in the first quarter of 2011 that turned a strongly growing Nokia smartphone sales into the world-record biggest fall. I explained this pattern in the blog earlier in this series. (Note, I was not talking about market share there, I was talking about absolute unit sales. While Nokia's market share was eroding very gradually, as more and more new rivals were entering the hottest tech space, smartphones, Nokia's total smartphone sales grew 53% in year 2010 - and grew more than Apple iPhone or Samsung smartphone or any other smarpthone maker sales that year). Then suddenly, in Q1 of 2011, there is a massive drop in sales, and then a continuing collapse that continues to today.

NOKIA FALL IN MARKET SHARE ANNUALLY 2009-2012
YEAR 2009 - 39%
YEAR 2010 - 35%
YEAR 2011 - 16%
YEAR 2012 -   5%
Sources: Nokia quarterly data, industry analyst consensus, and TomiAhonen Consulting 2013
This table may be freely shared

NOKIA FALL IN MARKET SHARE QUARTERLY 2011-2012
Q1 2011 - 24%
Q2 2011 - 15%
Q3 2011 - 14%
Q4 2011 - 12%
Q1 2012 -   8%
Q2 2012 -   6%
Q3 2012 -   4%
Q4 2012 -   3% (est)
Sources: Nokia quarterly data, industry analyst consensus, and TomiAhonen Consulting 2013
This table may be freely shared

That is a world record, folks. A world record in market share fall in the mobile phone industry. A world record in failure. And how ironic, that Nokia would take this record, from previous record-holder Microsoft, by switching to a Microsoft-based strategy, and hiring a Microsoft guy as CEO. Yeah if you really want to fail spectacularly in mobile, you kind of need that Microsoft Windows power to really ruin your life, as we learn from such mobile industry failures as Sendo and Kin, who never even had the chance to get into the big time, or the falls of LG, Motorola and Palm, which all were fuelled partly or completely by Microsoft.

ELOP EFFECT

So what happened in Q1? There was no fire at a Nokia factory or a strike by employees or sudden collapse of some critical Nokia component supplier. There was no Tsunami causing evacuation, no nuclear power plant disaster causing electricity shortages and no volcanic cloud causing delivery distruption. There was no catastrophic component disaster like Sony had with exploding laptop batteries or Apple had with 'antennagate' (you are not holding your phone correctly). There was no sudden emergence of a rival phone that changed the market economics like the iPhone in 2007 killed Motorola's Razr and Palm and Windows Mobile. In fact, in 2011, Apple's iPhone 4 was delayed at launch, from June to September, so Nokia had even more room to succceed, not less. 

At the end of 2010, Nokia had released its most successful handset - the N8 - and most successful Symbian operating system upgrade, S^3 ever seen, with 4 million N8 sales powering a total of 5 million of the new Symbian S^3 device sales in Q4 of 2010. This hot new flagship phone with its 12 megapixel camera and full touch screen was winning awards globally and still two years later is on the charts as one of today's best smartphones. Yes, running 'obsolete' Symbian. The uptake of N8 was so strong, it set a Nokia-record for biggest jump in Nokia smartphone sales, Nokia smarpthone average sales prices, Nokia smartphone profits, and Nokia profitability! And that N8, was about to see its 'sister phone' the E7 with the QWERTY keyboard slider and even larger screen (at the time, a giant 3.9 inches, far bigger than the iPhone of the time) to be launched in January 2011 (to huge initial success and accolades, especially from China, the world's largest smartphone market).

Anyone who says Nokia was 'losing' the war to Apple and RIM and Samsung and HTC simply is living in the lala-land of fantasy. In 2010, Nokia was more than twice the size of its nearest rivals and grew more in year 2010 than any of its rivals, so the gap to Nokia and the pack chasing it was not closing, it was growing. It so dominated the global smartphone market, Nokia was increasing the gap between it and the rest of the challengers. This is a fact. So, then, why the sudden comprehensive collapse of this massive success? Something happened in Q1 of 2011.

ELOP EFFECT FEBRUARY 2011

Yes, it was the Elop Effect, the costliest management error of all time. We already heard of the Osborne Effect. Before that, lets talk briefly about the Ratner Effect. Ratners was a successful discount jewelry store chain in Britain. Its CEO was asked why do they sell so much jewelry, to which he replied they sold so much because it was crap. He badmouthed his own products. This caused an instant collapse of Ratner jewelry sales, the company went to the brink of bankruptcy and the CEO was fired and the whole retail store chain totally rebranded. Imagine rebranding a retail chain like Ikea or H&M or Walmart or 7-Eleven... Ratners had to invent a new identity and fire the CEO just to survive. Thats the Ratner Effect.

That happened in year 1990. No CEO had since been as foolish to try this suicidal trick to ruining your market, until a certain Stephen Elop, new CEO of Nokia, who decided to pen his infamous Burning Platforms memo - in which he did, yes, call his own products rubbish to the degree they were in his words uncompetitive in the market and in his words had fallen behind such rivals as the iPhone. So this was as if to celebrate the 20 year anniversary of the Ratner Effect, Stephen Elop's 'homage' to that corporate suicide attempt by repeating it. Except that Elop decided to be even more Ratnerish, than Mr Ratner himself. Ratner was telling the truth, when he said his jewelry was cheap because it was crap (it was, a very poor low-grade quality of gold mixture, etc).

Elop called Nokia's products uncompetitive - when they were beating the competition globally. Yes, I know what you think and what you may have read at some very misguided 'tech' press. But we deal in the real world and real numbers here on this blog. Nokia was not losing, far from it. Nokia not only was winning, Nokia was dominating the smartphone market more than Toyota or GM has ever had the luxury of dominating the car market! Just in the world's largest market for smartphones, China - Nokia had over 70% market share! In Africa (a Billion people, thats three USAs) or in the Middle East (another USA by population, but partially overlapping Africa, obviously) Nokia's smartphones had 80% market share. In India, the worlds' second largest mobile handset market even as smartphones were not yet highly sold, Nokia had over 70% market share in all phones.

Nokia was not losing to Apple's iPhone and other rivals, Nokia was more than twice as big as the iPhone in smartphones (thats excluding the real race, where Nokia was 8 times bigger in all types of phones, which is how Nokia's CEO also should have looked at the race, not by Apple's SteveJobs-colored glasses of conveniently excluding 80% of the handset market in 2010). And yes, Nokia's gap to its nearest rivals was INCREASING in 2010, not decreasing. Nokia was beating the rivals like a rented mule. Who looks at the iPad today, in tablets, and says Apple is 'losing' the tablets war? Come on. Nokia sold 103.6 million smartphones in 2010, as per the final revised numbers reported by Nokia in its Quarterly numbers. And Apple sold 47.5 million iPhones. Who was winning? (keeping in mind, both companies did this profitably, and both companies were growing in a healthy way, and both companies had said in 2010 that smartphones were the strategic future of the company's total product portfolio).

Elop took the Ratner Effect, where Ratner honestly called his products rubbish - which collapsed his sales. Elop looked at his winning smartphone products that were increasing the gap to rivals in 2010, and decided to destroy that sales growth, by 'doing the Ratner' - he Ratnererd Nokia's reputation. With the Burning Platforms memo. And don't say it was an internal memo that was leaked, of course it was leaked, Elop released to all staff and when it was leaked, Elop instantly jumped on the media to claim ownership of the memo. He intended it to be released. He was very proud of it back then. (He has since expressed regret and retracted many of the dumbest statements in the memo, and admitted to the Nokia shareholders' conference in April 2012, that yes, the Burning Platforms memo had hurt Nokia smartphone sales - something he now seems to suggest, he had not anticipated at the time?)

Add to that the Osborne Effect. Elop also decided in February to demolish Nokia current strong smartphone sales growth by Osborning the whole line. Note, this has NOTHING to do with the 'decision' to shift away from Symbian - that decision was made long ago before Elop. This was the sudden change, that the new operating system for Nokia's smartphones would not be one made by Nokia, ie Symbian and MeeGo, the new operating system only months from launch, but rather, Nokia would abandon its own operating systems altogether and join the Microsoft family supporting Windows Phone. What was wrong in the Elop Effect is the timing. Elop announced his end of Symbian in February, when the first Lumia smartphones using Windows Phone would not be available until November 2011 (in tiny numbers, in volume starting January 2012). This is the classic Osborne Effect. Announcing a new, incompatible platform that instantly makes current products obsolete. It is what destroyed the Osborne Computer Company. It is what previously helped set the world record in market share collapse in handsets, by Windows Mobile in the immediate previous two years. Before the Elop Effect, Nokia had a market share of 35% in 2010. After the Osborning of his products, up until Windows Phone based Lumia smartphones were available broadly and in volume, ie at Q4 of 2011, Nokia's market share had fallen to 12% !!!! (yes, it was obviouly both the Ratner Effect and the Obsorne Effect, but still..).

CARRIER BOYCOTT AND RETAIL BOYCOTT

Stephen Elop totally voluntarily, with no reason whatsoever, caused the Ratner Effect by spreading lies and falsehoods about how bad Nokia products are. That caused an instant collapse of Nokia retail sales. I was on this blog immediately reporting it, and since Nokia CEO himself has admitted to the Nokia shareholders meeting in April 2012, that Nokia retail is often refusing to sell Nokia branded handsets, even when they have them in stock in the store. Nokia never had this problem before, Nokia was proud of the world's best retail and distribution network in the industry. Immediately after the Elop Effect, Nokia's retail revolted and put Nokia into what I call here a 'retail boycott'. It is not explicitly all stores or all store staff, it is far more random, where given sales reps simply refuse to show or sell (and increasingly store managers even refusing to stock) Nokia phones. Not just smartphones - all Nokia phone sales fell in early 2011 at a Nokia record speed. So the Ratner Effect side of the Elop Effect was clearly a self-inflicted wound. It was like an Olympic biathalon skiier (the ones who ski and shoot) deliberately taking his rifle, and shooting himself in the foot while competing.

Stephen Elop also voluntarily and unnecessarily caused the Osborne Effect in February 2011 by announcing the Microsoft Windows partnership at a time when he had no phones to sell or even to show. This was a timing disaster. Nothing would have prevented Elop from waiting until September to make the announcement, the usual timing Nokia has for a new phone to be launched, about two months before. Then the stores would have been able to sell old stock at some discounts, and used the news of the new phones as big buzz to increase interest in Nokia. The Osborne Effect hit the carrier community more than the retail stores. The carrier handset bosses who make strategic decisions about which handsets to support (and in many Industrialized World countries where handset subsidies are still common - also which of the handsets to subsidise and by how much). When the carriers/operators and their strategic leadership learned in February 2011, that the Symbian line is dead, and that Nokia has suddenly shifted away from MeeGo (even as Nokia had China Mobile as a carrier-partner supporting MeeGo and Nokia had prepared a new MeeGo based smartphone for Verizon - called SeaRay, what Elop later would cannibalize to create the first Lumia phone, the Lumia 800, etc) - they of course instructed the handset buying execs to discontinue supporting Symbian.

That makes 100% sense, if the Nokia CEO announces a change in his strategy, that Symbian is suddenly killed and its replacement, the much-promised MeeGo is also killed, then yes, the carriers will abandon Symbian immediately. It does NOT mean that the carriers will be taking Windows Phone instead, that would remain to be seen. For example Android was already growing strongly at this time and most of the Windows partners had shifted completely or partially from Windows to Android already at this time. The carrier reaction to the Osborne Effect was predictable and obivous, for example Horace Dediu ie Asymco was up on his blog instantly announcing that the Windows decision would collapse Nokia sales.

Note, that the Osborne Effect side of the Elop Effect hit essentially only the smartphone side of Nokia. So it collapsed Symbian sales by Nokia, not really impacting the dumbphone/featurephones sales (which were hit by the Ratner effect). And also Elop's Osborne Effect caused the ending of NTT DoCoMo's loyal support of Symbian in Japan, instantly also collapsing the Japanese Symbian sales overnight. NTT DoCoMo shifted to Android and is now in the process of bringing MeeGo's successor, Tizen based smartphones to Japan in 2013. Elop has since bitterly complained, time and again that the carriers are not supporting his strategy. Before the Elop Effect, Nokia had the largest carrier relations of any handset manufacturer and the carrier relations were the pride of the company, a clear competitive advantage second to none (now that is obviously with Samsung who stole all those contracts and deals and is forging new success replacing Nokia at every turn, such as with Tizen replacing MeeGo)

But yes, there was no need whatsoever for Nokia to make the Microsoft announcement in February, when the first phones weren't due until November. This was a self-induced wound. Its like the skiier in the biathalon now taking his rifle, deciding that the pain in one leg is not enough, and shoots himself in the other leg as well, to really damage his chances of winning this race.

THINGS GOT WORSE WITH SKYPE

The Nokia fall was already bad, then came Skype. This is not about which phone has or does not have Skype. We've had Skype on mobile phones since the middle of hte last decade. Today most smarpthones can have Skype installed and we can bypass the carriers completely if we use WiFi for example. This is not about having Skype on a phone (the early Nokia Lumia phones did not have Skype even). No. This is about who owns and bankrolls Skype. In other words, who keeps Skype alive, to threaten the carriers. Skype is the biggest existential threat to the mobile operators/carriers. Yes, Whatsapp or Blackberry Messenger or iMessage or Facebook are threats too, as what are commonly called OTT providers. Skype is the biggest. Skype has passed 1 Billion registered users (not all using it obviously) and through the Microsoft purchase of Skype in June 2011, Skype is now being expanded to cover all 1.2 Billion desktop/laptop/tablet/smartphone users of Windows and possibly even Xbox and beyond. For context, the world's largest mobile carrier/operator only has about 800 million users. Skype is a gargantuan threat to the carrier community.

Skype is not only messaging or only voice, it is voice, messaging and videocalls. Skype is particularly used in the most lucrative part of mobile operator business, cannibalizing international voice minutes and roaming revenues. Voice calls form 60% of mobile operator/carrier revenues and 50% of profits. SMS text messaging forms 20% of operator/carrier revenues and 45% of profits. So in total, Skype threatens about 80% of revenues and 95% of profits of the carrier community! If voice and messaging traffic disappears to Skype, or the revenues of it fall drastically, meaning the profits in it collapse totally, the operator/carrier business goes bankrupt. No two ways around it. Skype is an existential threat to carriers. For Microsoft to suggest to carriers, let me put Skype on your smarpthones via Windows Phone, is like labeling a bottle of poison as 'tastest great' and asking carriers to drink it all. That is not about to happen.

Stephen Elop testified to the Nokia shareholders meeting on April 2012, that its not that Skype exists which is killing Nokia sales. It is because Microsoft bought Skype - that the very ownership of Skype is what causes the carriers to reject any Windows based smartphones by any manufacturer. Before the Skype purchase, Microsoft had SonyEricsson, Samsung, LG, HTC, Huawei, ZTE and Dell supplying Windows based smartphones. After the Skype purchase, SonyEricsson, Dell and LG quit Windows completely - while HTC reduced its Windows portfolio shifting more to Android - Samsung announced the Tizen OS project - Huawei and ZTE decided not to roll out Windows Phone 8 based smartphones ie the next generation. All who have commented, either officially or indirectly, have said that the carrier demand for Windows ended with Skype. Nobody in the carrier community wants Microsoft anymore. The only reason they say nice things sometimes, and let Microsoft and Nokia occasionally launch a phone model or two is because Microsoft and Nokia are throwing quite literally billions of dollars into the marketing spend. The moment the money stops, the carriers say, sorry, it wasn't that popular after all. This is exactly the pattern we saw in Britain, in Germany, in America, and we will soon see in China too.

Not my words! So testified Nokia CEO Stephen Elop to the Nokia shareholders meeting in April, that the carriers dislike it that Microsoft owns Skype, adding 'of course' as it is so well known in the industry. And he added in a long reply that there are carriers who are refusing to sell any Windows based smartphones and that a year of negotiations with carriers involving Elop himself, and Microsoft, have not convinced any carriers to take the suicide pact of drinking the Skype poison and becoming Microsoft's bitch, sorry I should say slave.

OSBORNED MEEGO TOO

And then Elop himself was not satisfied in the damage done to Nokia smarpthone sales. He had his new smarpthones coming out running MeeGo, the wonderful new OS powering the N9, that has been winning praise the world over, many reviewers actually calling it better than the iPhone - no smartphone had ever gotten that kind of review, certainly none by Nokia before or since; nor of any Microsoft Windows platform either (by any honest tech review, I am ignoring the Microsoft-planted propaganda stories such as their inflated Amazon ratings by the ghost reviewers who were caught being paid to write positive reviews of Windows Phone smartphones). MeeGo had three handsets and a tablet ready to launch in 2011 and many more to come. Nokia actually produced only two, the N9 and N950, both highly beloved by those who have used them. The Nokia N9 won the design award of the year in 2012 by the D&AD awards, considered the Nobel Prizes or Oscar Awards of the design industry (beating Apple among others). This was a high-price flagship superphone that in every side-by-side review beat all contemporaries from the iPhone to the Samsung Galaxy to the Nokia Lumia. If you liked the original Lumia 800, recognize that phone model, originally as the SeaRay was the little sister to the N9, when both were designed to run on MeeGo. After Elop force-migrated the SeaRay to become his first Lumia Windows smartphone, it had lots of its abilities sacrificed, making it a bastard child nobody could love.

So back to the N9. If you manufacture such a highly desirable and excellent device, you roll it out everywhere and let its sales fly (even more, if your smartphone unit is seeing currently dramatically declining sales, your factories run idle and your are bleeding cash). Can you imagine Apple, if it releases a new device that suddenly wins all awards and is called the best in field, by every analysts at the time? Apple would roll it out everywhere and ramp up production. Elop refused to let the N9 be sold in major markets, would not release the N950 for sale anywhere, and to really make sure he nailed every nail into the coffin of the Nokia-owned and developed MeeGo world, he announced one day after the N9 was revealed, that Nokia will not support any further MeeGo devices! He Osborned his own product one day after it was born. Natural born killer, that is what Elop is. He is Dr Kervorkian-Elop, the Suicide Doctor of the mobile industry.

BALLMER THEN OSBORNED LUMIA 1.0

So Nokia had released four Lumia based smartphones by June of 2011 and had deals with AT&T and T-Mobile in the USA, and even the first deal in China with China Unicom. When Steve Ballmer did what he knows best, f*cking his partners. Ballmer announced that Microsoft will not provide a migration path for any first generation Windows Phone prodcuts (on WP 6 and WP 7 versions) into the new Windows 8 ecosystem, where a new Windows Phone 8 OS would be introduced instead. Ballmer looked at his struggling partner Nokia, and all others still left in the Windows ecosystem, and decided to screw them royally. No migration path. Even after the disasterous results of the 'no migration path' decision with WIndows Mobile two years before. That caused the 2012 sales of Lumia of the first generation, what I call Lumia 1.0 to collapse. Nokia Lumia sales had just started to catch some success, and actually doubled from Q1 to Q2. But the Osborne Effect is immediate and dramatic. Nokia's very next quarter that strong growth was traded for instant call. The Lumia sales fell by 28% from Q2 to Q3. This even as Nokia was offering Lumia at fire sale price cuts, literally in some cases sold in the one penny basket (with contract).

So while Nokia's collapse started with the Elop Effect, that damage might have ended during 2011, and with the new Windows Phone smartphones on Lumia and the hot MeeGo based N9 and N950, Nokia could have recovered at least some of the losses, or at the very least, stopped the decline, if Elop was a competent CEO. Instead, after the Elop Effect, we had the Microsoft Skype purchase, that caused carriers to institute a global boycott of all Windows phones by any manufacturers (and many Microsoft partners exited at this point). Then Elop caused yet another Osborning of the MeeGo system. And finally Ballmer Osborned what little success Nokia was trying to build with Lumia 1.0. Now we start, once again, from zero, with Lumia 2.0, running Windows Phone 8, not from a strong Nokia market position of 35% global market. Not even from the far weakened position when Lumia 1.0 was launched, when Nokia held 14% of the market. No, now the Lumia 2.0 is being introduced on an OS platform that still has a global carrier-boycott against Skype against it, with Nokia bringing in 3% market share to support that transition. How is this going to play out?

I am expecting Nokia will not survive and am expecting some rivals to come in, buy Nokia not for the smartphone competence or the factories or carrier relations or distribution or brand strength - but because Nokia has the world's largest patents portfolio in the mobile industry and that alone is worth more than the roughly 10 Billion dollars that is Nokia's market cap value today.

SAME PICTURE WITH SUMMARIES

I promised a variation to the simple picture in the above. Here is the same graphic, but adding the small boxes to describe the main reasons why these seven mobile handsets failed. You may use either graphic or both if you want to report on this story

This graphic may be freely shared

So yes, please do feel free to share this or any other stories, statistics, graphics and quotations in your stories about mobile and tech. And any journalists out there - look at this graphic. Look at Nokia. If this was Apple iPhone or Toyota or Boeing or Coca Cola, setting the world record collapse of its industry (and arguably a world record of any industry) - isn't that a HUGE story to tell? If you are a journalist or blogger, please do your story on this, and report on it. This is the biggest story in tech and some journalist who writes the Nokia Elop story will be winning the Pulitzer. And this story will become a case study at Harvard and all MBA schools, so if you are inclined to write a book - the Elop Effect and Nokia's collapse is a true case study in stupidity and ineptitude. Please do consider researching and writing your story about it.

WORLD RECORD FALL

So thats the story in Balamory. We had seen six incredible collapses in the handset industry. LG lost almost a quarter of its market per year for three years running, but recovered and is now healthy again. RIM and Siemens lost a third of the market per year for three years. RIM was on the ropes but now looks like it will survive. Siemens in mobile phones did not. Motorola and Palm lost four out of ten customers they had, per year, for three years in a row and went bust. And Windows Mobile set the world record for market failure losing literally half its customers per year, on average, for two years in a row, until the system was shut down and totally replaced.

Now we have Nokia under Elop. He looked at Ratner and Osborne, saw how they destroyed their respective companies, and decided he can do better. He combined the two, introduced us to the Elop Effect, that started Nokia's fall. Then partly through Elop's own idiotic decisions and partly due to Microsoft's actions, the problems at Nokia smartphones got only worse. Nokia's market presence has been falling 62% per year and rumors are increasing that Nokia will go bankrupt, or be sold, or both. Elop has acted in desperation moves from selling some of his smartphone factories (where the future of the industry is, that tells you how little Elop believes his strategy can succeed) to selling whole units, to selling some patents to selling Nokia's HQ building in Finland. This has been - and by a huge margin - the biggest fall in the history of the handset industry. Elop has taken growth and shot his company in the foot - twice - and even more since. He has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. He had the win in his grasp but he voluntarily let it slip away. No, he actually flung it away. Elop has precided over the biggest market share collapse in the handset industry and is definitely the worst CEO of anyone in the mobile industry, ever. I will return with more analysis to this series, to illustrate, Elop is not just the worst CEO in telecoms, he is the worst CEO in any industry, of all time. But yes, keep your eyes on Nokia, we are witnessing a world record being made - a world record in failure. Elop is synonymous with total comprehensive failure.

Elop should do the right thing and resign. But as he is clearly not honorable enough to do that, he should be fired by Nokia Board immediately. You cannot hold onto a CEO who has just made Nokia a laughing stock and produced a world record failure for Nokia's illustrious history. 

PS ELOP OPENED DOOR TO ANDROID TODAY

And perfectly on que, today Elop admits what many analysts have been saying that must be considered as Nokia's Plan B - when Gizmodo asked Elop (on their Spanish site) is Android possible in Nokia's future, the shock response, "anything is posssible". What happened to Microsoft forever? What happened to Elop and Ballmer being BFF's Best Friends Forever? Was it last April when Elop broke the friendship by admitting that carriers hate Skype and won't support Windows Phone handsets by anyone? After that point it seems the two have gone to war. Microsoft announced its tablets and talks now openly of its own smartphones. Ballmer announced Nokia's Lumia phones can't be upgraded to Windows Phone 8. Microsoft suddenly wants to have huge retail space in a massive global series of stores to sell Microsoft products similar to Apple stores. Nokia tries to claim it is still in a special relationship with Microsoft, but Ballmer now shows HTC smartphones and others, no longer Lumias. Earlier we heard Nokia was hiring Android staff, supposedly just to do some mapping app port, but who knows how much Android staff they actually hired worldwide with that pretense. Elop has been getting the Android question for 23 months, literally, 23 months now, ever since he first announced Microsoft. He's always up to now said there is no plan B, Nokia will only go Microsoft. Now, today, Elop suddenly drops the bombshell that yeah, Android is open possibility in the future.

What if Nokia decided last summer that Windows WAS dead, what Elop heard from all carriers and the other handset makers departing the Microsoft ecosystem or giving it only lip service? If Elop and Nokia's Board decided last summer ie 2012, that Windows is dead, and they now need a new Plan B, and Elop had just finished destroying Symbian, MeeGo and Meltemi, and if last summer they decided to quietly shirt to Android, then when might we see the first Nokia Android smartphones? About Christmas 2013. The development cycle in this industry is 18 months from clean table to first handset sold... So having done his share of Osborning, maybe Elop does know that Android phones are coming to Nokia, and now wants to start the buzz and speculation, so that he could then announce them around September or October of this year, to sell for Christmas.. At this moment pure speculation but lets start to monitor the rumor space. 

Lessons from this blog? Its almost exactly parallel to LG. The massively costly misadventure to Microsoft, replaced by the rescue Plan B via Android back to profitability. And the irony? Elop himself sunk Nokia's own Linux based smartphone OS platform, MeeGo and he also sunk the low-cost handset OS running Linux, Meltemi, now to replace Nokia's OS with Linux-based Android, where Nokia is not in any way in control... And irony upon irony, MeeGo legacy living on via Tizen on Samsung and Huawei, as well as via Sailfish used by handset-maker start-up Jolla of Finland.

This was part 3 in the series of Nokia strategy mistakes illustrated by one picture each
The series started with the long blog re-visiting Nokia's SEC filing that identified risks in the Windows strategy (And how bizarrely almost every risk is turning out to actually have happened)
Then in Part 1 of the single-issue blogs, I showed how Nokia unit sales turned from record growth to sudden collapse timed exactly at Elop Effect February 2011
Then in Part 2 I compared Nokia market performance to the two other big smarpthone makers of the past three years, Apple and Samsung.


More stories coming in this series, each one with one picture to showcase one management failure by the world's worst CEO, Stephen Elop of Nokia.

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

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

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

KANTAR SUGGESTS WINDOWS PHONE SALES ARE DOWN FROM Q3 !!

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

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

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

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

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

ANY OTHER CONTRADICTORY DATA?

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

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

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

SYMBIAN SALES GROWING SUGGESTS KANTAR

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

KANTAR NUMBERS SUGGEST 6.8 MILLION TOTAL NOKIA SMARTPHONE SALES

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

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

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

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

WINDOWS PHONE EVEN WORSE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Introducing the TomiAhonen Phone Book 2012, my statistical volume on the handset industry, totally updated for 2012 data

The most dynamic big industry on the planet. The most relevant technology to all digital migration today. The future of the PC says the biggest PC maker Hewlett-Pacard, the future of the internet says the biggest internet company Google, the future of home electronics says the biggest home electronics company Sony, the future of social networking says the biggest social networking company Facebook, the future of gaming says the biggest gaming company EA, the future of money says Visa, the future of TV says the BBC, the furure of music says Warner Music, the future of newsmedia says the Associated Press, the future of .. well, just about anything digital. That is mobile - a Trillion-dollar industry, driven by its consumer-facing gadget, the 250 Billion dollar mobile phone handset business, epitomized by the likes of the iPhone 5 and the Samsung Galaxy S3.

Yet little is known of this huge industry, apart from the quarterly sales numbers. There are six times more mobile users than Facebook. Six times more people use mobile phones than have a car. But we know far more about Facebook and about our cars, than we know about the phones in use. Five times more mobile phone telephone numbers in use than fxed landline phone numbers globally. Four times more mobile users than the total number of personal computers of any kind, desktops, laptops, netbooks and tablets all added together! Three times more mobile phone accounts than total television sets on the planet. Three times more mobile users than internet users (and the internet user number include mobile users). Twice as many people use mobile phones than use a toothbrush on the planet. Mobile phones have 1.5 times more users than FM Radios on the planet. People are replacing their wristwatches with mobile phones, mobile phones are used by hundreds of millions of illiterate people so more people have use of mobile than have use for pen and paper. That is a massive industry indeed.

Yet what do we know about it, except the news coverage, that Apple won some lawsuit against Samsung. Did that stop Samsung selling its Galaxy S3 or the Galaxy Note? No, Samsung keeps selling more smartphones than Apple does. We see from some quarterly smartphone stats that Nokia's Lumia series is failing, and maybe the article mentions that Windows Phone has so far only has captured 3% of the smartphone market after being 24 months on the market and nine months of hectic Nokia, Microsoft, AT&T and related marketing extravaganza. Yes, so Nokia Lumia is failing, did you know Nokia's Symbian smartphones still outsell all Windows Phone smartphones by all manufacturers? Yes its true. And that by global reach, the 'obsolete' Symbian reaches the pockets of 132 million people worldwide while the new wonderful Windows Phone doesn't reach 30 million today. And yes, you read that right - Symbian has a far wider reach by active users than say, Blackberry. That is the kind of information you may want to know, but is horribly hard to find.

If you are involved in the mobile industry or are interested in it, you will want to know what kind of camera resolutions are in use worldwide, how many of the phones in use are cameraphones, and how many of them have a camera with the resulution of 5 megapixels or more. You will want to know how many phones have a QWERTY style input to do messaging efficiently or how many have a touch-screen input, etc. How many mobile phones are 3G enabled, or have WiFi or do Bluetooth or NFC or GPS, or have a memory card slot. That kind of information is almost impossible to find anywhere, unless you buy one of those industry reports costing thousands.

What of the regional differences. Clearly the iPhone sells well in the USA and Europe, but when you go to India or Africa, you won't find iPhones. What is the regional success of given phone brands, smartphones, and their operating systems. What is the migration rate of the phone base in Latin America from basic phones to smartphones; what is the migration rate of phone technology from 2G to 3G in Africa; what is the connectivity capacity of CDMA vs GSM in Eastern Europe, how many Asians are connecting to the new Chinese TD-SCDMA 3G standard, etc. And what are the prices? What are average prices of smartphones in the Middle East or of dumbphones in the North America? What is the price pyramid of handsets, of those smartphones sold, how many are in the price range of an iPhone for example. These are all issues that may be of big relevance to you, yet they are mostly not covered anywhere. 




Now we have one source! All these and more, in the brand new edition of the TomiAhonen Phone Book 2012, all data updated and current to the end of the year 2012. How many mobile subscribers have multiple phones, how many phones are smartphones, how many phones have an HTML browser or can do Java. What are the regional reaches of the various smartphone platforms etc etc etc. All the data in one place, in one document, 172 pages, over 100 tables and charts, and best of all - its all formated for the small screen ! Yes, the TomiAhonen Phone Book 2012 is formated for the small screens of smartphones. In a pdf file format, you can read it on any smartphone, keep all the mobile industry data handy in your pocket, available at any time.

 

Many of the major data sets are broken down by the 8 regions I also use in the TomiAhonen Almanac and the TomiAhonen Mobile Forecast - so 4 affluent parts of the world: North America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe and Advanced Asia-Pacific Region; and 4 Emerging World parts of the world: Africa, Latin America, Middle East and Asia Developing. The Phone Book 2012 even has a big data table in the back covering the 60 biggest countries by handset sales - thats nearly every relevant country you can imagine - and shows their mobile subscriber counts, their handset annual sales, ther average sales prices, their bestselling dumbphone brand and bestselling smartphone brand per country, etc. An invaluable resource, just that one table alone. Here is the table of contents for the Phone Book:

TomiAhonen Phone Book 2012
Table of Contents and number of charts/tables per chapter

1 - Intro (0)
2 - Size of Mobile Industry (5)
3 - Mobile Customers (4)
4 - Handset Market 2012 (9)
5 I- nstalled Base of Handsets & Features (17)
6 - Market Shares (7)
7 - Smartphones (17)
8 - Smartphone Operating Systems (11)
9 - Dumbphones (4)
10 - Datacards & Accessories (2)
11 - Smartphone Applications (7)
12 - Major Players (9)
13 - Digital Divide (5)
14 - History and Milestones (0)
15 - Tables (6)
Appendix
About the Author

The TomiAhonen Phone Book 2012 has just been released. It only costs 9.99 Euros, you can buy it only from one place, my website, at this link: TomiAhonen Phone Book 2012. I will shortly add the full updated table of contents (it still shows the previous version from 2010), so you can see more detail. But yes, if you were hungry for data about the handset industry, this is your best value resource, get yours today!  TomiAhonen Phone Book 2012