Gartner Says Worldwide Mobile Phone Sales Grew 35 Percent in Third Quarter 2010; Smartphone Sales Increased 96 Percent
Worldwide mobile phone sales to end users totaled 417 million units in the third quarter of 2010, a 35 percent increase from the third quarter of 2009, according to Gartner …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second consecutive quarterly datapoint in Gartner's mobile tracking: its August 2010 release put worldwide mobile device sales at 325.6 million units in Q2, and Q3's 417 million phones — up 35 percent — confirms the recovery in unit demand is broad-based, not a one-quarter bounce.
What separates this print from the raw totals is the mix shift underneath it: smartphone sales nearly doubled at 96 percent growth, and the story traveled widely enough that Wired's Gadget Lab framed the takeaway for consumers — one in five phones sold is now a smartphone, and one in four of those runs Android.
First-order effects
- Handset vendors' revenue now hinges on smartphone share: with that segment growing at roughly triple the pace of the overall 35 percent phone market, every quarter of underinvestment in smartphones costs more than equivalent feature-phone losses recoup.
- Android's presence on one in four smartphones sold makes Google's free platform the volume engine of the quarter, giving carriers and OEMs a credible alternative that did not exist at scale two years ago.
Second-order effects
- Component suppliers and contract manufacturers see order books rebalance toward smartphone bill-of-materials — touchscreens, application processors — as smartphones approach one in five of all units, pressuring vendors still weighted to feature phones.
- Developers and content owners face a rapidly enlarging addressable base as the smartphone installed base roughly doubles year over year, pulling marketing and product budgets toward mobile-first distribution.
Third-order effects
- If the gap between 96 percent smartphone growth and 35 percent total-market growth persists, value consolidates at the access layer: the handset becomes the primary computing and commerce device, forcing analysts — including Gartner itself, whose own 2009 PC forecasts were among the grimmest on record — to reframe the PC as the peripheral.
The trend: Smartphone sales doubling while the total phone market grows 35 percent marks the quarter handsets displaced PCs as the tech industry's unit-growth engine, a pattern each subsequent quarterly count extends.