Samsung Will Lead Smart Phone Unit Sales for 2 Years

Fitch Ratings expects Samsung Electronics to maintain its leading position in smart phone unit sales over the next two years.

Samsung’s market share of smart phone unit sales has risen to 31 percent from just three percent two years ago. In 2011, the company sold 96.7 million smartphones (Apple: 91.3 million), and 45 million in the first quarter of 2012 (Apple: 35.1 million). Apple’s unit market share increased to 24 percent from 16 percent, but Nokia plunged to eight percent from 38 percent.
 
In large part, the unit sales lead is possible because Samsung has a wider range of handset models than Apple, enabling a more effective penetration of both developed and emerging markets.

Samsung also is the undisputed leader for key smartphone components – including display, processor and memory chip technologies – reinforcing the likelihood that its future smartphone models will be equipped with cutting-edge technology, Fitch Ratings says.

Android operating system market share, which stood at 56 percent in the first quarter of 2012 suggests that the perceived gap in terms of user-preference between Apple’s iOS and Android’s OS has narrowed significantly.

Samsung has amassed a record 10 million pre-orders for its latest Galaxy S3 model, which was launched on a global basis in June 2012. Fitch forecasts that Samsung will sell around 400 million mobile handsets during 2012, of which 220 million will be smartphones (2011: 330 million handsets, including 97 million smartphones).

Smart Phone Ownership Predicts Tablet Ownership

There will be 69.6 million tablet users in the United States by the end of 2012, and 133.5 million tablet users by 2015, eMarketer estimates. 


People with smart phones are showing themselves to be eager adopters of tablets, according to  comScore. According to the research, 24 percent of smart phone users had used a tablet in the three-month period ending April 2012, an increase from 10 percent recorded a year earlier.

Microsoft Launches its Own NFC-Enabled Wallet for Windows Phone 8

Microsoft has unveiled its near field communications-enabled mobile wallet, as part of its planned Windows Phone 8 operating system. That's good news, long term, for NFC, but it makes the near term mobile wallet and payments business even more fragmented. Windows Phone will be the third major mobile platform to support a wallet, after Google’s Android-based NFC wallet and the recently announced Passbook wallet from Apple. 


But unlike Google, Microsoft has made it clear it will support subscriber information modules (SIMs)  as the secure element to anchor payment and other secure applications in its wallet. That is a carrier-friendly move in keeping with Microsoft's traditional approach to the mobile handset business. 


Windows Phone 8’s new digital Wallet will allow users to keep debit and credit cards, coupons, boarding passes, and other credentials in the device. When paired with a secure SIM from a mobile carrier, it will support payment functions. 

Both Research in Motion and Nokia will "Disappear" in 2013, Analyst Says

Research In Motion and Nokia will not exist in 2013, according to 24/7 Wall St.  Five years ago, RIM was the only smartphone company of any size, and it had almost the entire corporate market. But it made a fatal mistake in failing to adapt its technology for consumer use. 


RIM once owned the smartphone market. Its BlackBerry products were used largely by businesses. It is hardly worth repeating the story of how RIM was late to the consumer market, where it has been pounded relentlessly by Apple and an army of Google Android phones from manufacturers as diverse as China’s HTC, South Korea’s Samsung and Motorola in the U.S. 


The pace at which the company fell apart was even more extraordinary than its rise, says Douglas McIntyre of 24/7 Wall Street. Revenue and net income jumped from $6 billion and $1.3 billion, respectively, in fiscal 2008 to $20 billion and $3.4 billion in fiscal 2011.


But research group NPD recently reported that RIM’s U.S. market share was 44 percent in 2009 but only 10 percent in 2011. 

RIM cannot survive as a standalone operation, McIntyre believes, a view that probably now represents the overwhelming consensus of industry watchers. 



In Nov. 2011, Ericsson sold its half of the Sony Ericsson mobile phone business, but surviving provider Sony now faces a smart phone industry dominated by Apple and Google’s Android. 


Nokia likewise will fail, he argues, though some would say Microsoft's backing might make a difference. 

Mobile Broadband Growth Dwarfs Fixed Access

By the end of 2011, six million U.S. households will depend on a wireless or mobile platform (including 3G or 4G) as their only means of accessing the Internet, according to Strategy Analytics. 

 That means seven percent of U.S. homes are wireless-only for broadband, up about 430,000 homes over 2010 levels. 

 These “mobile-only” customers typically connect to broadband using 3G or 4G-enabled smartphones or PC dongles, and are unable or unwilling to use a wired broadband service such as cable, DSL or fiber, Strategy Analytics says.

Nearly half of all adults (47 percent) go online with a laptop using a Wi-Fi connection or mobile broadband card (up from the 39 percent who did so as of April 2009) while 40 percent of adults use the internet, email or instant messaging on a mobile phone (up from the 32 percent of Americans who did this in 2009), the Pew Internet and American Life Project reported in 2010.

Since then, mobile Internet access has grown, especially among minority Americans.  But the trend is increasingly common, for lots of people.

When asked what device they normally use to access the internet, 25 percent of all smart phone owners say that they mostly go online using their phone, rather than with a computer.

While many of these individuals have other sources of online access at home, roughly one third of these "cell mostly" Internet users lack a high-speed home broadband connection, Pew researchers say.

In other words, about eight percent of broadband users might rely exclusively on mobile broadband (a third of the respondents who “mostly” rely on mobile broadband).

Smart Phones are Changing the Gaming Business

Smart phones are changing the broadband Internet access business, the computing appliance business and the software business. Now smart phones seem also to be changing the gaming business. 

Browse more Gaming infographics.

How Big Will Mobile Payments Business Be in 2012?

Predicting how much new revenue can be created in any new business, even one expected to be quite large, in an exercise in assumptions. One has to estimate the volume of activity, and then the revenue for each action, to derive an estimate for total industry revenue. Mobile payments are no exception.


Worldwide mobile payment transaction values will surpass $171.5 billion in 2012, a 61.9 percent increase from 2011 values of $105.9 billion, according to Gartner. 


To illustrate what that could mean in terms of payment transaction fees, if all those gross purchases produced a 1.75 percent transaction fee for a transaction provider, a revenue stream of about $3 billion would result.

The number of mobile payment users will reach 212.2 million in 2012, up from 160.5 million in 2011.Gartner also predicts. Spread over the entire planet, that isn't a huge amount of revenue for all the potential providers.


But the business is just starting.