European smartphone market up 41%, with Nokia leading the way
The European smartphone market has grown 41% in the past year, according to a new report from comScore. There are now 60.8 million smartphone users across the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy.
Currently, one out of every two smartphones is a Nokia device (Nokia accounted for more than two out of every three smartphones a year ago).
“Nokia is still the clear leader in the European smartphone market and as the eagerly anticipated N8 launches, all eyes are on Nokia,” said comScore European VP mobile, Jeremy Copp.
“While Nokia has made great strides with offerings such as the Ovi Store and Symbian 3, the pressure is on to reclaim valuable market share. By innovating and bringing new phones to market for a wide variety of audiences, Nokia’s future is not predicated on the success of one handset alone.”
Nokia’s Symbian platform holds 54.4% of the Western Europe market, according to comScore. Despite Symbian’s continued growth in the market, its share has fallen due to increasing competition with Apple and Google’s operating systems, which have both enjoyed significant growth in the last year.
Symbian was installed on almost 69% of new smartphones in July 2009, but that figure fell to 54.4% in July 2010. Meanwhile both Apple and Google enjoyed gains, growing their overall market share by 9 percentage points and 5.6 percentage points, respectively, over the same period.
BlackBerry manufacturer RIM also saw its share of subscribers grow, while Microsoft’s Windows Mobile platform lost ground.
In the US, 53.4 million people owned smartphones during the three months to July. However, RIM was the leading mobile smartphone platform in the US with 39.3% share of smartphone subscribers, followed by Apple with 23.8% share.
Google also saw significant growth in the US during the period, rising 5.0 percentage points to capture 17% of smartphone subscribers. Microsoft accounted for 11.8% of smartphone subscribers. Despite losing share to Google Android, most smartphone platforms continue to gain subscribers as the smartphone market continues to grow overall, comScore said.