 "Nokia drops to No 10 among all smartphone manufacturers")
The latest report on mobile and smartphone sales for the latest quarter by Gartner is out, and the news for Nokia isn’t great. Nokia has seen its mobile phone share drop 4.9 percentage points in the first quarter of 2013 mainly due to a steep decline in feature phone sales. Although Nokia’s Windows Phone sales have improved, selling 5.1 million units, Nokia is yet to see high growth in the smartphone segment. Nokia’s position in the smartphone market dropped to No. 10 in the first quarter of 2013, from No. 8 in the fourth quarter of 2012. In comparison, Samsung sold over 100 million mobile phones and nearly 65 million smartphones in the same period and stayed firm at the top spot.
Not looking too good
The trend of people moving to smartphones over feature phones continued with smartphones sales recording a 42.9 percent growth as compared to last year. Worldwide smartphone sales totalled 210 million units in the first quarter of 2013 while mobile phone sales stood at nearly 426 million units in the first quarter of 2013, a slight increase of 0.7 percent from the same period last year. The Asia-Pacific region was the only region to show growth in mobile phone sales this quarter, with a 6.4 percent increase year-on-year.
In the first quarter of 2013, smartphones accounted for 49.3 percent of sales of mobile phones worldwide. This is up from 34.8 percent in the first quarter of 2012 and 44 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012. On the other hand, sales of feature phones decreased by 21.8 percent in the first quarter of 2013.
“More than 226 million mobile phones were sold to end users in Asia/Pacific in the first quarter of 2013, which helped the region increase its share of global mobile phones to 53.1 percent year-on-year,” said Anshul Gupta, Principal Research Analyst, Gartner. In addition, China saw its mobile phone sales increase 7.5 percent in the first quarter of 2013; its sales represented 25.7 percent of global mobile phone sales, up nearly 2 percentage points year-on-year.
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