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Microsoft shipped 18m Windows Mobile phones in the last 12 months
Territories covered
Western Europe
Austria,
Belgium,
Denmark,
Finland,
France,
Germany,
Greece,
Ireland,
Italy,
Netherlands,
Norway,
Portugal,
Spain,
Sweden,
Switzerland,
UK,
Central and Eastern Europe
Hungary,
Poland,
North America
Canada,
USA,
Asia-Pacific
China,
India,
Japan,
South Korea,
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Published:
31-Jul-08
Microsoft sold over 18 million Windows Mobile licenses in its last fiscal year, falling short of the targeted 20 million goal the company had set in early 2007. Microsoft had announced 14.5m Windows Mobile handsets had shipped in the six months prior to the Mobile World Congress in February, which indicates a sharp decline in sales in the last quarter. This decline has been attributed to delays in handset launches.
In the fiscal year ended June 2008, Microsoft did not sell proprietary hardware but licensed its mobile operating system (OS) to third party manufacturers such as Motorola or HTC. Over the same period, RIM sold 16.7m Blackberry phones and Apple sold most of the 6.1m first generation iPhones produced. Screen Digest estimates that over 80m Symbian phones were sold in the same time frame.
Our take...
As mobile handsets gain additional features and computing power, devices increasingly need adequate operating systems (OS) to help users coordinate and manage the variety of multimedia tasks. Despite the #2 spot held by Microsoft over the last 12 months, the outlook for its mobile OS is less than promising. Screen Digest expects Windows Mobile to lose its second place to RIM's Blackberry OS in the 2008 calendar year, and Apple's iPhone 3G to close in on Microsoft as well.
Microsoft's position in the OS market is weakened by a series of factors.
First, the bulk of its sales are North American, a very competitive territory that has been very receptive to the competition. RIM is thriving on the corporate market, while Apple's iPhone is a success on the consumer front. Even Palm's latest low cost Centro is showing encouraging sales of nearly a million units per quarter.
Secondly, after the Symbian move to open source and Android's launch, Microsoft will remain the only hardware-agnostic OS developer that still licenses its OS to third party manufacturers at a price. Microsoft will find it increasingly difficult to justify a cost for its OS when hardware manufacturers have two free promising alternatives.
Screen Digest expects Microsoft to adapt its strategy, first by starting to push its own hardware/software offer through the Sidekick brand it acquired in February (current Sidekick models feature another legacy proprietary OS) then by softening its license terms to better compete with the open-source smartphone OSes.
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Analyst intelligence & notices
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