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Giant phones are finally a big deal in the US
Extra-large phones have been hot stuff in some countries for a long while, but not so much in the US. The country must have had a change of heart in the past few months, however. Kantar Worldpanel estimates that gigantic devices jumped from 6 percent of American smartphone sales in the first quarter of last year to 21 percent in early 2015. Why? If you ask Kantar, the launch of the iPhone 6 Plus was partly responsible -- it racked up 44 percent of all supersized phone sales despite being just a few months old. The analyst group isn't saying much in public how other brands were doing, although it's safe to say that category pioneer Samsung grabbed a large slice of the pie thanks to high-powered behemoths like the Galaxy Note 4.
iPhone 6 Plus accounted for 41% of Q4 U.S. "phablet" sales in one month
Apple has been struggling to keep up with demand for the iPhone 6 Plus ever since it was released on September 19. While that demand might be frustrating for users waiting to get their devices, it's proven to be very good news for Apple's sales. How good? According to a new report from Kantar World Panel, the iPhone 6 Plus accounted for 41 percent of all "phablet" sales in the three month period ending October 31, 2014. That means in just a little over a month of sales, Apple was able to dominate 41 percent of the entire phablet market -- smartphones with a screen equal to or larger than 5.5 inches measured diagonally. In that period, according to Kantar, phablet sales made up 10 percent of the overall smartphone market. For the same period the year before, they only accounted for 2 percent of sales. Kantar asked buyers at the point of sale what drove their choice when purchasing: 58% of those surveyed who bought an iPhone 6 Plus said screen size was the primary reason for choosing their device. Despite the more compact design of the iPhone 6, 60% of consumers who chose it also cited screen size as the primary purchase driver. The ability to connect to a 4G/LTE network was the second most important reason cited by both buyer groups. The iPhone 6 was also a smashing success, raking up 33 percent of smartphone market share and becoming the top selling model among iOS devices for the period. You can read the report for yourself here.
Windows Phone thrives in Europe, but struggles in China and the US
Microsoft's quest for smartphone market share is hitting a few roadblocks, it seems. Kantar estimates that Windows Phone is still gaining ground in Europe, where it's up year-over-year to 8.1 percent of sales in the first quarter of 2014. However, it's taking a bruising in other areas. In the US, Windows swung from increases this fall to a slight dip in the winter; while it's still doing relatively well at 5.3 percent of US share, it's not posing much of a threat to Android or iOS right now. The platform also took a drubbing in China, where its share was nearly cut in half to exactly one percent thanks to the rise of budget Android handsets.
Kantar: iPhone 5 boosts Apple's US smartphone share to 53.3 percent, Android still tops in Europe
Stop us if you've heard this one before: the launch of a flagship, brand-defining smartphone gives its creator a swift leap in market share immediately afterwards. There's no surprise that the iPhone 5 will have improved Apple's standing in the US, then, but Kantar Worldpanel's market share study suggests that the lift was more than some expected. The firm estimates that Apple climbed to 53.3 percent of American smartphone share in the three months leading up to late November. The figure is both Apple's highest ever for the country as well as its first venture past the 50 percent mark. Android in this climate held on to 41.9 percent of the market, hinting that many of those market-shifting iPhone sales came after October. Kantar expects a similar story this month, although it's not predicting how well the Cupertino crew will fare beyond that. Lest anyone take the results out of context, Kantar points out that it's often a Google-friendly world. Android represents 61 percent of smartphone sales in the five largest European countries, while Apple's share in countries like Brazil and China is still small. There is an upside for Microsoft on this wider scale -- a year of Nokia Lumia sales and the early results of the Windows Phone 8 launch have reportedly pushed Redmond's platform back up to 4.7 percent in those five European nations. We're a long way from going beyond a two-horse race in the smartphone field, but there's at least hints of change on the horizon.
Shocker: smartphone users like bigger screens, market share may respond accordingly
There's been a trend towards big smartphones. Sometimes, really big. Even so, concerns have persisted that the cart is driving the horse -- that customers are buying big phones because that's what's available, not because they have a preference. Kantar Worldpanel ComTech might not put that issue to bed once and for all, but its latest study suggests that there's at least some appeal to all that extra glass. Among Android phones sold in the past three months across eight countries, 29 percent of them had a screen larger than 4.5 inches. Their owners were unsurprisingly more active as well, using the internet and watching videos more often than those whose phones have more modest displays. Market share might be following suit. Throughout the countries Kantar is tracking, Android still has roughly half or more of the market, ranging from 46.8 percent in Brazil to a staggering 86.8 percent of Spain. In Europe alone, it was up by just over a fifth from a year ago. We know iOS is taking a beating outside of the US as a result. Before anyone calls the trend irreversible, however, remember that we're on the edge of an unpredictable period: we know some mobile fans have been holding out for a new iPhone, and all the apparent rumors have Apple choosing a bigger screen that might satisfy some outstanding gripes with screen sizes. We're also anticipating at least a few Windows Phone wildcards that could shake up the status quo and make this a three-horse race.
Kantar: Windows Phone clawing back share thanks to Nokia, but Android still rules the roost
It's seldom the case that we get to look at world smartphone market share on a national level, but Kantar WorldPanel has given a rare peek that might give Windows Phone fans some good news to crow about. Even though things haven't always gone well for the Microsoft camp, Nokia phones like the Lumia 800 sparked a minor Renaissance in some countries in the three months leading up to mid-April: Windows Phone was up to between three and four percent in France, Italy, the UK and the US. The Metro interface must also be sehr gut for Germans, which nearly doubled Windows Phone's local share to six percent in that short space of time. Kantar is eager to point out that it's still mostly a tale of Android and iOS successes, though. Google took extra ground in Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK and the US, while Apple was on a tear both on its native soil and in the UK. HTC's upbeat predictions may have played a significant part in Android's continued rise -- the One X cracked the British top 10 list despite having only been in shops for a few days. About the only underdog story not going well in early spring was RIM's, where the BlackBerry's share of the US was cut to a third of its year-ago glory at three percent.
Smartphone wars: Android "has half of the UK smartphone market"
Kantar Worldpanel ComTech -- a prominent market research firm and a powerful figure on the Scrabble board -- today released its latest "smartphone OS barometer" report, and it has some noteworthy conclusions in it about the British market. Specifically, the report claims that in the 12 weeks ending 2nd October 2011, iOS market share in the UK was 18.5% whereas Android was more than two-and-a-half times that -- 49.9% of all new smartphone sales. Apple's share at this time last year was 32.9%, compared to 28.8% for Android. In the US, Kantar's numbers show an even stronger tilt in Android's favour: 66.4% Android, 21.5% iOS. Beyond the head-line grabbing Apple-vs-Android story, there is other interesting data in the report. In the UK, 69.1% of all phone sales in the last 12 weeks were smartphone sales -- and 43.8% of the population now own a smartphone. It also has the interesting tidbit that HTC does rather better out of Android sales than Samsung (44.8% of all Android phones are by the former, and 37.9% are the latter). Internationally, Samsung is a long way ahead of HTC. I need to address one common criticism of many market share comparisons. It goes like this: while Apple quotes its volumes in terms of units sold to end-users, many Android OEMs quote units shipped to distributors and resellers instead. This skews figures against Apple because it means unsold handsets languishing in stock rooms around the world count as "sold" stock. Kantar Worldpanel's methodology doesn't work that way. Rather, it gathers material from interviews with volunteers who have agreed to be tracked. It "conducts over 1 million interviews per year in Europe alone," which is certainly some substantial data gathering. A second issue people often bring up when discussing market shares is carrier availability. In the US, the iPhone was (of course) only available on a single carrier until relatively recently. This factor doesn't affect the UK market. All six of our mainstream carriers have been selling subsidized iPhones since the release of the iPhone 3GS, and all six also offer Android handsets as part of their ranges. It's a level playing field. I spoke with Dominic Sunnebo, the author of the report, and asked him for more information on Kantar Worldpanel's testing methods. He told me: In order to generate the insights you have seen published we have a longitudinal panel of demographically (age, gender, region & ethnicity) representative individuals in each country: for example we track 15,000 people in the UK, 20,000 in the US, and 26,000 in Brazil. We interview the same individuals every 4 weeks, to see if they have had any change in their mobile ownership e.g. new phone, new tariff, new network, etc. The day/date of these changes are recorded, and these figures are then collated into time periods e.g. "12 weeks ending 03rd October 2011" (as in our latest report). As it is the same individuals we interview each time, this also allows us to accurately track switching between brands, OSs, networks, etc. Now, there is an important mitigating factor to Apple's seemingly poor numbers, specifically the iPhone 4S launch timing. We know that Apple phone sales dipped throughout the last few months as people waited for an updated iPhone, followed by explosive sales of the iPhone 4S. It seems sensible to expect Apple to regain some of those market share points in future reports from Kantar Worldpanel. Given the size of the gap between Android and iOS, though, it's difficult to imagine it closing completely. The report also mentions that consumers in the UK are particularly price-sensitive to smartphones, preferring to choose a lower-end handset on a free-with-monthly-plan pricing to higher end phones where a purchase price is charged. This, of course, was a market Apple was not addressing at all until the iPhone 4S launch just a few weeks ago, at which time the iPhone 3GS became "free." If Kantar's analysis of consumer preferences is correct this should also give Apple a boost in the future. It's also debatable just how much market share matters. As Charles Arthur says in the Guardian, Apple's relatively low market share in the computer market hasn't stopped it from making a mind-boggling amount of money. If you could be the CEO of a company that makes all the widgets or a company that makes all the money, which would you choose? The opposite point of view, proposed by Henry Blodget of Business Insider, is sometimes referred to as "the Highlander Principle" after that film's famous line "there can be only one!" Technology platforms always converge onto one dominant platform, goes the reasoning, as developers concentrate support on the OS with the greatest numbers of users and users flock to the platform they are most familiar with and has the widest range of apps available. Certainly, this happened in desktop OSs, with Windows maintaining its two decade stranglehold to this day. Therefore, Blodget surmises, iOS is doomed and Apple "FANS" (his article was sub-edited by cAPTAIN cAPS lOCK) are clinging to a dying platform. Blodget ignores significant areas in consumer technology, however, where the Highlander Principle hasn't happened at all -- such as mobile phone OSs at any point in history up until now, or games consoles, or even social networks (which should be more vulnerable to network effects than most -- and yet Google+ and Twitter and Facebook all co-exist). Blodget even concedes that as so many modern apps are cloud-based, the strength of the "platform" in a modern smartphone OS is somewhat diluted. Yelp is still Yelp, whether you use its iPhone app or its Android one. Meanwhile, to muddy the waters further, Android users are far more thrifty than iOS ones. Even if Android outsells iOS forever, this factor means devs could easily make more money on Apple's platform. It remains far from clear what the future holds. To my mind, the question isn't whether Apple is losing ground to Android; that seems pretty certain, at least in the narrow terms of the numbers of handsets sold. Rather, it's: what sort of handsets are they? Some amount -- perhaps most -- of the sales that Android is picking up comes from thrifty consumers buying low-end phones and not spending a lot of money on apps. It seems a deliberate part of Apple's strategy to leave that part of the market unaddressed -- consider that the cheapest pre-pay iPhone in Britain is an astronomical £320 ($510) for an 8 GB 3GS. That may or may not be the right strategy in the long run.
