“I’ve often said that the smartphone rising tide has lifted many boats. If you were selling smartphones during the last three years, your business was growing, no matter what phones you made,” Horace Dediu writes for asymco.
“In fact, measuring success and failure was a matter of deciding what growth rate was ‘not good enough,'” Dediu writes. “Growing at 30% was nearly enough to shame some vendors into re-evaluating their strategies. But that sort of tidal growth can’t last. At some point ships with holes begin to sink no matter what the tide brings. When we look at the data from the last quarter, we should be asking again whether some ships have developed some leaks… There is an unsettling drop in Nokia and Motorola and a weakening in Samsung and HTC.”
Dediu writes, “The challenge is in eliminating seasonal effects. Q1 is usually a sequential drop for many markets. There is an unsettling drop in Nokia and Motorola and a weakening in Samsung and HTC… Apple and RIM seem largely unaffected by seasonality but Apple is growing twice as fast.”
Read more in the full article — which, of course, contains some excellent graphs — here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Brawndo Drinker” for the heads up.]