“Much was made Wednesday in Gartner’s latest Worldwide Mobile Phone Sales report, and in subsequent news coverage, of the sudden surge in the sales of so-called “white box” mobile phones in the third quarter of 2010,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune.
“According to Gartner, these unbranded phones are being snapped up in such huge numbers in Asia and elsewhere that the major manufacturers have started to give ground to the ‘Other’ category, which by Gartner’s count more than doubled year over year and now accounts for 33% of all mobile phone sales, more than Nokia, Apple and HTC combined,” P.E.D reports.
“All of which struck Asymco’s Horace Dediu as odd,” P.E.D reports. “‘Doubling share in a year is possible if you’re at 1% share,’ he writes in a note posted Thursday morning. ‘But to double from a base of 16% is sounding improbable.’ To check Gartner’s claims he compares its Q3 sales report to IDC’s, issued two weeks earlier. What he discovered was that in the same three months, IDC counted sales of 340.5 million phones and Gartner counted 417 million — a 77 million unit discrepancy…”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
The moral of this story is, ‘everybody has an agenda’.
Heya
i am from Asia and i have never heard of anyone buying white box phones?
Asian are very brand conscious and wont buy just any old thing.
Anything can be proven with carefully crafted statistics.
How about:
it’s actually very hard to get accurate numbers in this industry and conscientious analysts can end up disagreeing? But, nooo, that wouldn’t make the posters on this thread feel as good about themselves (no longer “holier than thou” or “smarter than thou”). Feeling good by trashing others is pretty pathetic…
P.S. I don’t know if these analysts are really being conscientious, but neither do all the “critics”!
Gartner’snumbers are bogus. How do they figure out the seek-thru for androids when none of the manufacturers nor the carrier provide hards numbers. With apple it is easy. Subtract the additional inventory from the unit sales numbers. All figures provided by apple. The only thing that Gartner can even try to guess are total android sales including those that stuff the channel.
Again bogus.
@Frederico,
Good point!
@dustymac
32% of all people know that!
@Muad’dib
32% of all people in the age bracket of 60 to 100yrs of age