Apple fritters

An article on Wall Street Journal says that it is time for RIM and Nokia to join forces in order to compete more effectively against Apple in the smart phone segment.

Apple’s iPhone 4 scored sales of 1.7M units in its opening weekend, a new record for an Apple product launch.

The WSJ article highlights Apple’s market cap of $250B towering over the market valuations for Nokia and RIM, each roughly at $30B. The article suggests that Nokia has been unable to “formulate an answer for the iPhone at the high-end, and as smartphones get more affordable for consumers, the market for low-end phones will continue to shrink.” 

I wondered if the WSJ article may be discounting the importance of the developing world in its forecast for shrinking demand for low-end phones. It is often too easy to be focussed on our own markets without keeping the rest of world in mind.

Let’s provide a little context for these numbers. The total mobile handset market in first quarter 2010 was about 323 million units, or roughly 3.5M new handsets sold every day, for the entire quarter. So, on its launch weekend, the iPhone 4 took about 15% of worldwide sales. Nokia has seen sequential declines in quarterly market share, but it still sells more than a million devices every day – with roughly a third of the global market.

It is that global reach that provides an important distinction for low end devices. Less than 5% of Nokia’s revenues from sales of devices comes from North America [Nokia’s quarterly filings]. Three quarters of Nokia’s sales volume is from outside North America and Europe. About 80% of Nokia’s sales were low end devices with an average selling price of 39 EUR.

Integrating Windows functionality into the next generation of high end Nokia devices will provide an alternative other than RIM for Nokia to engage with the corporate market. 

A bigger question is where does RIM go from here?  

Lots of questions remain in the mobile device market. Will success in doing battle with Apple in the mobile device market parallel the computer market? Is it a case of religious debates, like Mac versus PC – Windows? Will Android be a more significant spoiler than Linux has been?