Symbian's report on their business in the second quarter of 2008 makes some good reading. The Headline number of shipped Symbian OS units is an impressive 225.9 million units over 249 different models, and compared to Q2 2007, there's been an increase in sales for that period of 5%. Digging a little deeper, the royalty received peer unit has dropped from an average of $4.30 to $3.40, leading to an 18% drop in income from royalties.
Read on in the full article.
Symbian reported second quarter financial reports that outlined a significant slowdown in both growth and profits that signal an end to its rapid acceleration as the leader in smartphones worldwide and suggest tough times ahead for the iPhone competitor.
Symbian has a weak and shrinking presence in the US, having slid from owning 25% of the North American market in 2004 to less than 5% today. Symbian's worldwide share has also tumbled recently, from a dominating 72.8% share in late 2006 to today's 55%.
The current state of Symbian's health is not good after iPhone 3G is released. Google is also preparing to launch its Android very soon. It is facing a very serious competition from these two formidable American competitors.
Quoted from: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/09/02/symbian_reports_slow_growth_in_the_wake_of_the_iphone_3g_launch.html
The begining of the end....
We develop software for mobile devices and our Symbian sales are extremely weak nowadays. Blackberry and iPhone sales are flying so it's not a problem after all but still I'm quite sorry about this. It seems we will discontinue our Symbian stuff.
I'm almost certain that the person above me who posted about symbian's failure to continue growing is delusional to believe that nokia is by any means worried about competition from apple and RIM. RIM (blackberry) target VERY different consumers than nokia does with its symbian and N-series handsets. furthermore, the markets in which apple and RIM do most of their sales is filled with consumers which are in my humble opinion the most impulsive consumers in the world. as many people are beginning to find, the iphone is stricken with flaws that the hardcore fanboys will refuse to admit are flaws. in my entire time in the US i have seen little to no advertisements for ANY nokia phone but almost every 1/2 hour i see an advertisement for the iphone or for a blackberry. im almost 100% certain that if nokia were to go on a marketing campaign as full of half-truths and flashiness as apple have their sales would go thru the roof. but then again...this is one man's opinion
Obviously the first 3 posts failed to read that there is a 5% annual increase, hardly "the beginning of the end".
The first three posts were made from the same person/troll. :tongue:
If you don't believe my personal experience about the weak Symbian software sales (vs. BlackBerry, for example), you can check Handango's stats. The situation was completely different a year ago, most of our revenue came from our Symbian S60 titles.
jonnybruha is a Kool-Aid drinking Nokia fanboy.
The future of Symbian is not in Nseries and Eseries devices, it's in humble, cheap mass market phones which retail for a fraction of the price of an iPhone and sell in the hundreds of millions instead of tens of millions.
Symbian is going after the mass market while Apple and Android are going after the higher end. There is overlap, but they're ultimately pointing in different directions.
Comparing sales of software on Symbian are deceptive because most of its hardware sales are to the majority of people who don't install extra software. It's always been an underperforming platform in terms of software sales compared to Windows Mobile and Palm, because WM and Palm devices tend to be bought by smaller numbers of people who are more enthusiastic about installing extra software.
Whether people buy software or not, it's the sales of the phones that ultimately matter to the manufacturers, because that's where the profits come from.
Software sales in general are starting to be eroded in the computing world as more and more services become web-based. An increasing number of people buy PCs without ever installing extra software, because their activities are entirely online and accessed through the browser.
Unregistered wrote:Symbian has a weak and shrinking presence in the US, having slid from owning 25% of the North American market in 2004 to less than 5% today.
How about some sales figures for Asia, Europe, Africa and the Middle East? I suspect you won't tell us them because you'd have to admit they've all risen dramatically.
It's funny how selective you are with your figures, with share compared to sales, and with which years you use as your starting point. You ought to try watching Yes Minister, Sir Humphrey would be proud of you.
It is facing a very serious competition from these two formidable American competitors.
Why do you keep mentioning America and the US market? Why does it matter that these are AMERICAN competitors? Is this some kind of flag-waving exercise?
American companies in general have performed very badly in the mobile world: Windows Mobile is still an also-ran after years of trying to replace Symbian, Motorola is giving up altogether and looking for someone to buy their failing mobile division, while Palm has gone extinct. It's Asia and Europe which are leading the way in mobile sales and technology.
Sorry to burst your bubble but the North American market for mobile devices isn't actually that big. People in the US and Canada tend to buy fairly primitive phones compared to their counterparts in Europe and Asia, perhaps largely because of the anti-competitive stranglehold that the network operators have over there.
Also, there's barely any growth in the NA market compared to the developing world. For example far more people buy phones in Africa and the Middle East than in North America.
If you want to know what's going to happen in the phone world take a look at India or China, that's where the future of mobile lies.
Tzer2: "Software sales in general are starting to be eroded in the computing world as more and more services become web-based."
Our software sales are rising, only our Symbian titles perform very bad nowadays. AppStore is flying as well, so I guess there are serious demand for downloadable software even on a device that's always connected.
Software is important to the manufacturers because it's the software that's able to cement the position of an OS for long years (see Windows for example).
There's always going to be discussion over such figures. But ultimately there are still more Symbian devices being sold every quarter than the rest of the smartphone platforms put together. Symbian isn't growing as fast in percentage terms as its competitors, but that's largely because they're starting from a smaller base.
It has long been inevitable that as more open platform come into play Symbian's market share in smartphones will decrease. You can argue that Symbian's inability to defend this is a weakness - but it was inevitable that as more companies got into open platform phones they would choose platforms independent of the market leader (Symbina Foundation happend for a good reason). The interesting stat to start watching will be overall mobile market share.
I imagine the relative lack of new Nokia S60 phones in H1 held back growth a bit. H2 should be interesting from that perspective - a lot of new phones in the last few months and more to come.
I'd also point out the fact that there were 92 Symbian phones in development versus 62 this time last year. I suspect that is related to the fact we'll start seeing the next gen chip platform next year, but even so it bodes well for the future.
Software sales is a very interesting area and yes Symbian is relatively weak here. You can point to a number of factors including distribution and awareness.
I think an important factor for this is that a lot of Symbian sales are further down the market (i.e. mid tier devices - though this isn't necessarily about price - it about what people buy the device for... i.e. buying the device for multimedia and phone.. not as a computing platform). Its going to be an interesting area to watch in the next few years - where does third party software go - can it sell in the mass market on mobile.... (i.e. think of PC sofware - how many people (compare high end users versus low end) regularly buy software for their PC... games is a good area... maybe an office suite...).
Our Symbian app sales are growing still. The rate of growth has slowed due to the economy. I think the other developer reporting a sales drop for Symbian apps is probably trying to sell rubbish software.
Maybe our software is rubbish, but the sales of the same stuff is flying on BlackBerry (with much higher competition). Also check Handango's statistics. It's clear that the S60 software sales are marginal compared to the other platforms.
Rafe wrote:The fact that there were 92 Symbian phones in development versus 62 this time last year. I suspect that is related to the fact we'll start seeing the next gen chip platform next year, but even so it bodes well for the future.
Software sales is a very interesting area and yes Symbian is relatively weak here. You can point to a number of factors including distribution and awareness.
I think that too many Symbian phones will confuse the consumers and reduce the resale value of the phones. Nokia will just need one sleek and innovative phone to beat the iPhone.