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Nokia and Motorola Boost Market Share in Third Quarter

5:30 am on November 24, 2006 | Category: Business, Cell Phones, Mobile Devices

The worldâ€™s two largest mobile phone makers, Nokia and Motorola, have both managed to increase their market shares in the third quarter, at the expense of third-place rival, Samsung Electronics, and several smaller manufacturers.

Nokiaâ€™s global market share rose by over two and a half percentage points to 35.1%, compared to 32.5% in the third quarter of last year. Motorola also made heft gains, boosting its share to 20.6%, from 18.7% last year. Samsung, meanwhile, saw its market share decline slightly in the past twelve months from 12.5% to 12.2%.

In terms of regional highlights, Nokia sold a total of 88.1 million handsets in Q3, boosting its share in every world market except for North America, and vaulting it back to the number one spot in Latin America.

Both Nokia and Motorola made significant strides in the Asian market contributed a burst of growth to both of the market leaders, as lower-priced handsets in China, India, Pakistan, Vietnam, and Bangladesh allowed for record growth in those markets.

â€œIf you look at where you had the biggest growth, you had Asia grow 54 percent,â€ commented Gartnerâ€™s principal research analyst, Carolina Milanesi, in a recent interview. Companies paid â€œmore attention to the emerging markets and so having more, cheaper phones on the market is obviously driving sales.â€

Milanesi went on to say that manufactuers that were able to â€œtap into those regions that are not saturatedâ€ made the largest gains in recent months.

Motorola and Nokiaâ€™s higher-than-expected growth numbers have caused Gartner to revise its full-year global handset sales forecast from 960 million to 986 million units. Some researcher, however, are being even more generous, and predicting that cell phone sales will reach 1 billion by the end of the year.

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