Sony Ericsson snatches third place by just 0.1%
Published: 26 November, 2008
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Sony Ericsson has achieved its long held dream of being number three in the global handset market, though this has owed more to the difficulties of Motorola and LG than SE's own strengths.
For the past few years, SE and LG have tussled for fourth and fifth rankings in the market, frequently swapping positions, but the downfall of Motorola has pushed them both up a notch. Both have released strong smartphones that have helped them challenge Samsung at the high end, but they have both struggled in the midmarket recently, and so SE's publicly stated goal of overtaking Samsung within a couple of years still looks far off. This is especially true given that Samsung has been the chief beneficiary of Motorola's decline in its home US market, and snatched the US lead in the third quarter.
In that quarter, though, Sony Ericsson drew ahead of LG despite a difficult quarter of its own, according to new figures from Gartner Group. It sold 24.8m handsets, down from 25.4m a year earlier but enough to give it 8.1% market share. Motorola managed to stay ahead of LG, shipping 24.6m units to give it 8% share; while the smaller of the two Korean majors was in fifth place on 7.8% or 24.1m units.
This means that there is only 0.3% dividing the third to fifth ranked phonemakers, and Gartner believes LG should bounce back in the current quarter, since "its pricing is more suited to the current economic climate" than SE, and could even take third position.
The gulf between these three players and the big two widens, with Nokia on 38.2% market share and Samsung on 17.1%. Nokia shipped 118m units, and Samsung saw a 26.3% rise in shipments compared to the year earlier period, at 52.9m.
Among the also-rans, RIM was in sixth place and Apple in seventh. According to Gartner, worldwide sales of mobile phones reached more than 309m units in Q3, a 6% year-on-year increase, but this was less than half the 16% growth rate seen in Q3 2007.
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