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Mobile phone sales beat forecasts in 2002, Nokia flat
Hanover, Mar 10: An end-of-year buying spree by consumers lifted sales of mobile phones well above forecasts in 2002, a research group said on Monday, adding that it expects even stronger growth in 2003.
Hanover, Mar 10: An end-of-year buying spree by consumers lifted sales of mobile phones well above forecasts in 2002, a research group said on Monday, adding that it expects even stronger growth in 2003.
A total of 423 million handsets were sold to consumers in 2002, up 6 per cent from 400 million units in 2001 and several million more than forecast, said Gartner Dataquest, one of the key research groups of the technology industry.
Market shares of the five key players changed little from the third quarter, with Finland's Nokia still firmly in the lead and selling more than twice the number of handsets than its nearest competitor, Motorola Inc. of the United States. However, Nokia no longer gained any market share over its smaller rivals. "We've seen phenomenal growth in countries like Germany and the Asia Pacific region," said Gartner analyst Ben Wood. Growth, especially in mature markets, was driven by consumers who replaced their old handsets with new ones earlier than expected.
Subsidies by mobile operators, crucial to push consumers into getting a new phones, was similar to previous quarters, meaning that the attractiveness of new products and the marketing were behind the sales increase, Wood said.
"We expect growth will increase, to perhaps 10 to 15 per cent this year," Wood said. It would be the first double-digit per centage growth year since 2000 when sales climbed some 50 per cent to over 400 million but then stagnated. To maintain growth rates phone makers are focusing more on replacement sales because many consumers already have a phone -- some one billion people around the world now use a mobile phone. This means manufacturers need to offer new features to give consumers a reason to ditch their old device.
Although a lot of attention is being paid to new colour screens and camera phones, most of the year-end sales surge was in basic handsets which now contain more features than before, such as voice dialling and musical ringtones.
"The advent of new handsets with cameras and colour screens has encouraged people to go to the shops where they found that low-end phones also have a lot of features," Wood said. He warned that operators were preparing to cut phone subsidies, which could hurt sales in 2003.
Bureau Report
Market shares of the five key players changed little from the third quarter, with Finland's Nokia still firmly in the lead and selling more than twice the number of handsets than its nearest competitor, Motorola Inc. of the United States. However, Nokia no longer gained any market share over its smaller rivals. "We've seen phenomenal growth in countries like Germany and the Asia Pacific region," said Gartner analyst Ben Wood. Growth, especially in mature markets, was driven by consumers who replaced their old handsets with new ones earlier than expected.
Subsidies by mobile operators, crucial to push consumers into getting a new phones, was similar to previous quarters, meaning that the attractiveness of new products and the marketing were behind the sales increase, Wood said.
"We expect growth will increase, to perhaps 10 to 15 per cent this year," Wood said. It would be the first double-digit per centage growth year since 2000 when sales climbed some 50 per cent to over 400 million but then stagnated. To maintain growth rates phone makers are focusing more on replacement sales because many consumers already have a phone -- some one billion people around the world now use a mobile phone. This means manufacturers need to offer new features to give consumers a reason to ditch their old device.
Although a lot of attention is being paid to new colour screens and camera phones, most of the year-end sales surge was in basic handsets which now contain more features than before, such as voice dialling and musical ringtones.
"The advent of new handsets with cameras and colour screens has encouraged people to go to the shops where they found that low-end phones also have a lot of features," Wood said. He warned that operators were preparing to cut phone subsidies, which could hurt sales in 2003.
Bureau Report