TechCrunch
Kantar: Android Accounted For 70% Of Sales, Windows Phone Grows By Tapping Dumbphone Users
The latest smartphone sales figures are out today from Kantar WorldPanel Comtech, and in case you needed one more metric to underscore the topline trend that’s been the case for years, the WPP market-research analysts are giving it to you: led by Samsung, Android, it says, accounted for 70% of all smartphone sales in the world’s biggest markets for the 12-week period to the end of July. Apple, meanwhile is an increasingly mixed picture, with shares as low as 6% in one market, Spain, and as high as 43% in the U.S. Interestingly, Kantar’s figures also highlight another important trend. Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS — and by association its biggest partner, Nokia — continues to gain ground, if slowly. It nudged up to 3.5% of sales in the U.S., and in Europe, it has nearly doubled its share in the last year and is now at 8.2% of sales.
It’s not all rosy for Windows Phone, though: in China, its already-tiny share halved over a year ago, and it’s now at just 2.2% of sales.
Dumbphones but not a dumb strategy
Kantar points out an interesting trend in how Windows Phone is growing. While Android and Apple’s iOS platform picked up a lot of speed by tapping smartphone users from Symbian and BlackBerry looking for something more dynamic, Windows Phone appears to be finding new people from somewhere else: the still-large amount of feature phone users in the world, with 42% of sales coming from those making their first moves off feature phones.
That’s a smart move: according to Gartner’s figures, feature phones (AKA dumbphones) still account for 48.2% of all mobile handset sales in Q3. These consumers are less likely to be entrenched in an existing smartphone platform. “27% of Apple and Android users change their OS when they replace their handset,” writes Dominic Sunnebo, an analyst with Kantar.
It will be interesting to see whether Windows Phone manages to pick up mindshare along with marketshare; or whether we finally start to see that success in one does not necessarily lead to success in the other. As Sunnebo points out, “Android and Apple take the lion’s share of the headlines and continue to dominate smartphone sales, so it’s easy to forget that there is a third operating system emerging as a real adversary.”
He points out that low-price models like the Lumia 520 now represents around one in 10 smartphone sales in Britain, France, Germany and Mexico. ”For the first time the platform has claimed the number two spot in a major world market, taking 11.6% of sales in Mexico,” he notes.
Among the other players, BlackBerry continues to languish and one wonders how a player that has all but disappeared will manage to claw back, strategic resolve or not. In the “big five” markets in Europe of the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, BlackBerry now accounts for 2.4% of sales; in the U.S. its share is now 1.2% of sales.
The golden Apple?
Kantar’s figures are an interesting counterbalance to figures from analysts like IDC, Gartner and Strategy Analytics, which chart shipments from handset makers (and therefore may be overshooting or undershooting how many consumers users are actually buying). And indeed there is a disparity: Kantar, a WPP-owned market research firm, says that worldwide Android accounted for 70% of sales in the 12 weeks to the end of July. In comparison, Gartner and Strategy Analytics both noted recently that Android took nearly 80% of smartphone sales in Q3.
Ultimately, all of them point to a very huge and now pretty established smartphone leader in the form of Google’s OS and how it is used by Samsung — we’re reaching out to Kantar to try to get an exact proportion of sales for Samsung specifically. What it also does is set the stage to see how the market responds to the all-but-confirmed introduction of some new, and possibly price-busting iPhone models from Apple.
The full table below:
Image: Flickr
Juicies Takes A Second Kick At The Kickstarter Can With Juicies+, Aluminum-Tipped Charging Cables That Won't Tangle
When a Kickstarter project goes well enough to inspire a sequel a few years down the road, it’s generally a positive sign. In the case of Juicies, a startup that originally built itself up on the back of a successful campaign to build 30-pin dock connector cables in a range of colours, the return to the crowdfunding site is about building cables for Apple’s new Lightning standard, as well as micro USB models that differentiate themselves in terms of design and materials.
The Juicies+ cable will juice up your devices using a combination of anodized aluminum to shield the circuitry of the connectors at each end, along with a woven cord of the variety that’s designed to prevent tangles and knots. The stated goal of this new design, according to Juicies founders Laurens Laudowicz and Hannes Reichelt, is to bring the cables we use to charge our devices every day up to snuff with the devices themselves in terms of design and craftsmanship.
Laudocwicz and Reichelt are a split team working from Honolulu and Bremen, Germany. Laurens began the first Juicies project on his own with the original Kickstarter, but the two paired up quickly after and Hannes has been helming European sales and distribution of the product ever since. Reichelt is an Economics grad with experience working for Siemens doing marketing and market research in the Middle East, while Laudowicz is an entrepreneur with work experience as an antiques buyer and marketer. Despite sharing relatively little product development experience between them, the pair successfully built the original Juicies online business and now sells 30-pin cables, micro USB and USB extension in a rainbow of colours.
Juicies+ is a sort of premium twist on the work they have already been doing, borrowing a page from makers of premium headphones, which often feature woven cable casing designs. Aside from offering a premium feel, woven cables are far less likely to knot or tangle with themselves or with one another, making them easier to stow hastily in a bag and then later recover.
The startup also needs to update its product for Apple’s current generation of mobile devices; Lightning is the prevailing standard on Apple iOS hardware now, and its use will likely occlude that of 30-pin entirely come September when Apple introduces new iPhone hardware. Accordingly, the Juicies+ team is going to be using Lightning connectors sourced from Apple via its MFI program to create its cables, which is the only way to guarantee compatibility with Apple devices. This could present one of the biggest potential risks for the project; Apple has been slower to provide MFI-certified parts to accessory-making partners, so there may be a bottleneck in terms of supply. It’s also the only authorized supplier of the Lightning connector acceptable for the MFI program.
The anticipated ship date for the Juicies+ cables is January, 2014, but a big part of the production process lies outside of the project founders hands because of the required MFI certification, so that date could well slip, especially if there’s renewed interest in Lightning components from accessory makers in the wake of Apple’s anticipated September iPhone announcement. Still, the team has shown it can work with Apple’s MFI program and ship product at scale in the past, so chances are backers will eventually get their money’s worth in this instance, even if it does take a bit longer than anticipated.
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