TechCrunch
Kantar: With Android Inching Up In Smartphone Sales, Get Set For An iPhone ‘Spike'
With Apple in the middle of its first month of sales of two new iPhone models, the latest figures out from Kantar Worldpanel, a market research division of WPP, indicates that going into September, sales of Android smartphones are the strongest they have ever been. In the last 12 weeks ending August 31, smartphones running on Google’s mobile OS accounted for over 70% of all sales across the five biggest markets in Europe (UK, Germany, France, Spain and Italy), with corresponding rises in all other major markets surveyed, including the U.S., compared to last month.
However, a look at the bigger picture highlights another trend, and an opportunity for the likes of Apple, Nokia and Android OEMs who are not called Samsung. In key leading markets surveyed — U.S., UK and Australia — the share of sales to Android are down over a year ago (respectively now at 55.1%, 56.3% and 62.1%). And specifically, the analysts note that Samsung has seen a “dip” in sales for a couple of reasons: market saturation in mature markets; and competition from others at the lower end.
After years of increasing market share, Android has now reached a point where significant growth in developed markets is becoming harder to find,” writes Dominic Sunnebo, director of research at the group. “Android’s growth has been spearheaded by Samsung, but the manufacturer is now seeing its share of sales across the major European economies dip year on year as a sustained comeback from Sony, Nokia and LG begins to broaden the competitive landscape.”
Important to note that right now Android and Samsung are at a high-enough marketshare that even dips in specific markets are not doing much to tip the balance overall. In Spain, for example, over 90% of smartphones sold in the last 12 weeks were Android handsets. In China the figure is over 72%.
We have reached out to Kantar analysts to see if they can give us data on Samsung’s current share of sales, and whether they can provide any early indications on what kind of an impact the new iPhone models are having on the market. (We’ll update when / if we get more data.)
Targeting bargain hunters
People have remarked a lot about how the new 5c version of the iPhone is not the budget device everyone had been expecting from Apple (although it is priced at a discount to the premium 5s model). So, notwithstanding the fact that the iPhone 4S is now seeing bargain (and often free) bundling with mobile contracts, this will leave the field open to other players who are targeting the “budget” smartphone market — that is, users in both developed and emerging markets that are more price-conscious.
So far, Nokia’s aim of developing handsets to meet that latter demand has been paying increasing, if not huge, dividends, Kantar notes. It says that Windows Phone sales, as led by Nokia, are now in double digit percentages in the UK and France, at 12% and 10.8% respectively, with its share of sales in Europe’s five biggest markets at 9.2%. But other important markets like the U.S. (3% of sales) and China (2.1%) remain huge challenges for both Microsoft and Nokia on the mobile front. All things relative, it is still overall doing better than BlackBerry, which is now down to 0% of all sales in China, 1.8% in China, and nothing over 4.2% in any other market.
Judging by the numbers, it looks like Nokia’s and Microsoft’s best bet would be to keep going for bargain hunters or those who are less inclined to buy premium-priced handsets, which interestingly tap into two quite different demographics. “Windows Phone’s latest wave of growth is being driven by Nokia’s expansion into the low and mid range market with the Lumia 520 and 620 handsets,” writes Sunnebo. “These models are hitting the sweet spot with 16 to 24 year-olds and 35 to 49 year-olds, two key groups that look for a balance of price and functionality in their smartphone.”
Apple’s opportunity
While Kantar doesn’t give any indicators on early iPhone sales, we already know from Apple that sales of the two new models topped 9 million for the opening weekend, compared to 5 million for the iPhone 5 release last year. They haven’t released any numbers yet, but Kantar’s analysts hint that this is a good indication of more sustained strong sales figures for Apple. “This is set to spike in the coming months with the release of the iPhone 5s and 5c,” Sunnebo writes.
For the three months that ended August 31, Apple accounted for nearly 40% of sales in the U.S., up nearly six percentage points over a year ago but down by over three percentage points on last month’s figures (perhaps because of anticipation over the new models). At the time, the new phones could see Apple pulling ahead of Android for the first time in a while. In Japan, Apple’s iOS was nearly level with Android going into September, at 48.6% versus 47.4%, but the phones are now going to be sold for the first time by the country’s largest carrier, NTT DoCoMo, and that “makes it likely that Apple will pull ahead of Android in this key market.”
Google To Be Punished In France For Failing To Pare Back Its Overreaching Privacy Policy
Google is facing sanctions in France after it failed to amend its privacy policy to comply with French data protection law within a timetable set out by the national regulator. France’s data privacy regulator, the CNIL, said Friday it intends to initiate “a formal procedure for imposing sanctions” — which could include a fine — after a three-month deadline to comply with its requirements passed without Google making any changes.
Instead, according to the CNIL, Google waited until the last day of the compliance period to file a response in which it contested the watchdog’s reasoning. “[Google] has not complied with the requests laid down in the enforcement notice,” the CNIL said in a statement.
At issue is Google’s January 2012 decision to consolidate privacy policies across more than 70 different products into a single policy. Being able to knit together user-data across distinct products clearly adds more fire-power to products like Google Now which draw on a range of data-point to power reminders and generate recommendations for individual users.
But there are serious privacy implications in consolidating all that data too — and unsurprisingly, once Europe’s privacy regulators joined the dots on those implications, the unified policy drew wide-ranging criticism, with watchdogs calling for Google to give users more control over their data.
The recurring complaints coming from European regulators about the unified policy are that Google:
- provides insufficient information to users regarding how it processes their data
- has undefined or insufficiently defined data retention periods — with no clear retention periods for data related to users’ profiles
- combines data in an unlimited way — reserving the right to combine data collected by its different services without limitation
France’s CNIL is one of six European data protection watchdogs that instigated national investigations into the privacy policy in April this year — invoking the threat of enforcement action should Google’s policy be determined to breach national law.
Then in July, the CNIL and the UK’s ICO formally asked Google to implement recommendations to ensure the policy complies with their respective national laws by September 20. It’s that failure to comply that has triggered sanctions in France.
The changes the CNIL had specifically asked Google to make to its privacy policy in France are to:
- Define specified and explicit purposes;
- Inform users with regard to the purposes of the processing implemented;
- Define retention periods for the personal data processed;
- Not proceed, without legal basis, with the potentially unlimited combination of users’ data;
- Fairly collect and process passive users’ data ;
- Inform users and then obtain their consent in particular before storing cookies in their terminal.
It’s not yet clear whether the ICO will follow the CNIL’s lead and also move to impose sanctions on Google. A spokesman for the watchdog told TechCrunch that it received a response from Google within the deadline period and is currently “considering it”.
The spokesman declined to give further details on the content of Google’s response.
Varentec Raises $8M From Bill Gates And Khosla To Reinvent Industrial And Utility Power Grid Management
San Jose-based Varentec, a company that builds power management and monitoring solutions for the electric grid, today announced the close of an $8 million Series B round of funding from Bill Gates and Khosla Ventures. The new funding follows its $7.7 million Series A, which was led by Khosla, and previously secured funding from the U.S. government. Varentec is about to start rollout of its energy monitoring and analytics solution for global electric utility companies and other industrial customers, and the funds will help it do that.
What Varentec hopes to accomplish understandably takes considerable funding juice; its aim involves updated outdated legacy systems that are in place at many of the world’s industrial sites, and which are intimidating projects to take on for utilities both private and public. Varentec has spent the past couple of years piloting its so-called “Edge of Network Grid Optimization with investor-owned utilities, including two in the U.S. and one in Mexico, and is now ready to roll things out on a production scale.
The means through which Varentec offers additional efficiency is by allowing utilities to install devices on the points in their system that are giving them the most problems – rather than requiring they install sensors and smart meters at every point throughout their network (hence “Edge of Network”). These devices use a line-based sensor that can actually alter voltage at that spot, with analytics and data gathering tools that make up the rest of Varentec’s secret sauce. These independently operating modules work better than remote sensors tied to a central command hub because they can respond immediately to problems and fluctuations.
Varentec’s founding team, which consists of Dr. Deepak Divan, Android Dillon and Mehrdad Hamadani haven’t been able to just convince some of the smartest investors on the planet of the value of their idea; they’ve landed a couple of grants for the U.S. government that total over $7 million, in addition to their venture funding.
Smart grid technology isn’t necessarily the flashiest thing around, but it is an opportunity with lots of potential upside in terms of ecological and economic benefits for some of the biggest and most stable businesses in the world. Initiating change in utilities is probably the biggest barrier to success, but Varentec now has a good amount of money in the bank to help it continue to build momentum thanks to this new investment.
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