Smartphone market will grow says Pyramid

Rating: RIM and Apple biggest threat to Symbian. Or Linux, maybe

Some pretty safe predictions Pyramid Research on the future state of the smartphone market. China is expected to overtake the USA as the largest market for smartphones. Emerging markets will be important. Smartphones will take an increasing share of the overall handset market. No surprises there, then.

Omar Salvador, the report’s lead author, says, “Although the USA continues to lead the globe in 2009 in smartphone sales, Pyramid expects China to capture the number one position in 2010.

[This will be] driven by operators’ aggressive promotion of smartphones using wider portfolios, more attractive pricing for services and new initiatives”.

The report – ‘Smartphone Forecast: Operator  Strategies Will Fuel  Growth in Emerging Markets’ says with a global marketshare of 47 per cent,  Symbian is the leading OS thanks mainly to Nokia’s N and E Series products, but it has been losing ground to RIM and Apple.

Apparently the Blackberry has a strong marketshare in India while Linux based smartphones do better in China. So Linux is the real threat, then?

Pyramid says the report will enable software developers to obtain a better understanding of the competitive landscape among both operators and vendors globally and in eight critical markets.

It also assesses the different needs of both mobile operators and handset vendors in emerging and mature markets. Developers can also identify market opportunities and develop go-to-market strategies based on the company’s  country-specific forecasts.

Given the difficulty GoMo News had in logging into Pyramid’s system to read the executive briefing of the report, this information will definitely prove to be rare.

Tony is based in Surrey and is a veteran comms journalist. Tony also writes on the UK market…. contact him here tony@mobileinsight.co.uk