While iPhone sales are growing, new data suggests Apple's share of the smartphone market is dipping.
There’s no denying that iPhone sales are booming. When Apple released its earnings results for the first fiscal quarter of 2010 , it reported sales of 8.7 million iPhones, which represents an incredible 100% increase in sales from the same quarter a year-ago. New data from ABI Research, however, suggests that while iPhone sales are trending upwards, Apple’s share of the smartphone market is dipping a bit.
Earlier this week, ABI Research released the results from a recent smartphone marketshare study and found that Apple’s iPhone represented 18.1% of all smartphone sales in the third quarter of 2009, only to fall to 16.6% of smartphone sales in the fourth quarter of 2009. Taking a step back, iPhone sales increased 18% from quarter to quarter, but the smartphone market as a whole saw an overall sales increase of 26%.
So should Apple be worried? Not at all.
Apple’s iPhone sales are still strong in their own right, and Apple’s margins on the device are exceedingly high. In fact, iPhone sales, for a few quarters now, have accounted for the bulk of Apple’s profits. Still, there’s only so much room for the iPhone to grow here in the US when it remains an AT&T exclusive.
There were rumblings prior to Steve Jobs’ iPad announcement last Wednesday that Apple would announce a CDMA iPhone capable of running on Verizon’s network, but that obviously didn’t transpire. Still, other rumors suggest that the iPhone will hit every major carrier in the US (Sprint, Verizon, T-Mobile) by the end of 2010. As it stands now, AT&T’s exclusive right to sell the iPhone is believed to expire in late June of this year, which would then open the door for a far broader iPhone distribution network while also relieving some of the stress levied upon AT&T’s 3G network by data heavy iPhone users who still complain about subpar service in large cities like New York City and San Francisco.
Overall, a decrease in iPhone marketshare growth isn’t indicative of waning interest in the iPhone, but rather the inevitable plateau one would expect from a phone only available on a single carrier. Given how sucessful the iPhone has been with just AT&T thus far, there still remains an incredible amount of room for growth with other carriers. It may be scary to think about, but the iPhone revolution, so to speak, is still in its infancy.
