ABI Research released some interesting numbers regarding the mobile handset industry for 2008. As you might have guessed by now, this past year was certainly a challenging year for all handset vendors. Yet despite the overall gloomy economic climate there were certainly winners and losers for the industry as a whole.

From a high level, roughly 1.21 billion handsets were shipped in 2008 – translating to an annual growth of 5.4% (but lower than the 15% growth in 2007). Sounds good right? Well.. the majority of this growth occurred during the first three quarters of 2008 (14% for the first half and 8% in Q3). Things took a serious downturn during the fourth quarter as the industry slipped a whopping 14%.

That’s the market level – but how about the company breakdowns? As we said earlier, there were winners.. and there were losers. We’ll start with the winners. Samsung grew by 2.7% to 16.2 percent of the industry. Nokia grew by 1.8% to 38.6 % of the industry and LG grew by 1.5% to 8.3% percent of the industry.  Of course, RIM and Apple also fairly positive growths for 2008 with RIM improving 0.9% and Apple improving 0.8%.

What comes up must go down right? RIGHT! The biggest loser this year was (drum roll please…) Motorola – down 5.1% in 2008 to an overall market share of 8.3%. Ironically, this is an improvement over 2007 when the company dropped 7.8%.

Motorola certainly wasn’t alone as Sony Ericsson also saw a drop in market share (down 0.7%) to 8% overall.

To summarize, here’s the overall market share map provided by ABI Research.

  • Nokia – 38.6%
  • Samsung – 16.2%
  • LG – 8.3%
  • Sony Ericsson – 8%
  • Motorola – 8.3%
  • RIM – 1.9%
  • Kyocera – 1.4%
  • Apple – 1.1%
  • HTC – 1.1%
  • Sharp – 1.0%
  • Other – 13.1%

One final conclusion to draw upon all of this data – the smartphone market is definitely growing and will eventually prove to be the dominant force in the overall mobile handset market.

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