Mobile Phone Market In 2009

Mobile phone market in 2009 is looking pretty good compared to the abysmal expectations of credit crunch, though the total sales dropped  by almost 8% globally, Apple still managed to stay profitable while Nokia performed better than the earlier expectations.

The fiscal highlights for the major mobile phone manufacturers include:

1.Apple’s gross profit margin rose to 36.4% from 32.9%,posting a 15% increase in quarterly profit to $1.21 billion from all it’s businesses.Apple sold 3.79 million phones with 123% growth YoY.

2.Nokia’s profits were down 90% compared to the same period the year earlier posting a net profit of $161 million on sales of $12.2 billion.

3.Samsung’s cellphone business reported a 36% jump in revenue, with a sharp profit jump to $700 million from $119 million for the fourth quarter.

4.Motorola reported total sales of $5.4 billion with a net loss of $231 million in it’s first quarter,much more than $194 million loss it had for the same quarter last year.The reported loss is much better than analyst forecasts.

5.Sony Ericsson posted a pre-tax loss of €358 million with handset sales plummeting 36 percent from the same quarter last year.It’s gross profit shrinked to a mere 8% from 29% a year earlier.

Infonetics Research, a market research company forecasted an 8% drop in the global mobile phone sales to 1.1 billion and predicted that smartphone sales will keep growing this year too just like in 2008 and same is reflected in the first quarter sales,Despite the global economy slowdown smartphone sales kept growing and symbian retains the top position followed by the Blackberry and iPhone.

Mobile phone market in India

Mobile phone companies enjoyed a tremendous sales in the first quarter in the country,assuming the number of new mobile phone sales to be on the order of the number of new mobile phone connections.March recorded the highest ever GSM additions with over 10 million new subscribers (while the sales from the new CDMA connections are not known) taking the total mobile phone subscribers in the country to more than 330 million.

With most of the new subcribers coming from the rural parts of the country, it is quite fair to expect 90% of the new phone sales to be contributed by low to very low cost handsets which also includes the cheap mobile phones imported from china.

Though there is a probability that the growth might slowdown if the credit crunch stays for a longer time with the rural youth loosing their work and disposable cash eventually affecting the mobile phone sales,otherwise the mobile growth story is here to stay for atleast couple of years.