The worldwide mobile phone market remained weak in the second quarter despite some encouraging signs in smartphone shipments, market researcher IDC said.
Mobile phone shipments fell 10.8% year-on-year in the second quarter to 269.6 million units, IDC said, noting the figure was an improvement over the first quarter. IDC revised its first quarter handset shipment figure to a 17.2% year-on-year decline, up from a 15.8% drop in its previous report.
“The challenges from the previous nine months – aggressive channel destocking, foreign exchange volatility, and uncertain demand – continued to plague the mobile phone market, but were not as severe as before,” says Ramon Llamas, senior research analyst at IDC, in a statement. Small signs of improvement centered around increased demand for high-end handsets, such as smartphones.
IDC predicts the global handset market will decline 13% in 2009 compared to last year.
The mobile handset market has been tough on companies but good for consumers, who benefited with lower costs, especially on high-end devices such as smartphones, IDC said. Stiff competition and hot demand has caused a price war for smartphones.
“Apple's price cut on the iPhone 3G reflects a trend we expect to continue in upcoming quarters,” IDC said.
Nokia Corp. remained the top mobile phone vendor in the world in the second quarter with shipments of 103.2 million handsets, down 15.4%t year-on-year, according to IDC. Samsung Electronics took second place among the global top five after mobile phone shipments rose 14.2% in the second quarter to 52.3 million units, while shipments at third place LG Electronics rose 6% to 29.8 million. Motorola's shipments fell 47% year-on-year to 14.8 million units, good for fourth place globally.
In fifth place, Sony Ericsson was the only company among the top-five to fail to increase handset shipments in the second quarter over the first quarter. The company shipped 13.8 million mobile phones in the second quarter, down 43.4% year-on-year and lower than the 14.5 million handsets it shipped in the first quarter.
