RIM's smartphone market share drops below 10%

24 May 2012

RIM's smartphone market share drops below 10%

17 February 2012

BlackBerry maker's share of the smartphone market dropped to 9% in the last quarter of 2011, Gartner finds, while Nokia plummets to 12%

Research in Motion's share of the smartphone market fell from 15% to 9% in the final quarter of 2011, according to the latest figures from analyst company Gartner.

Worldwide smartphone sales grew by 47% year-on-year to reach with 147 million units during the quarter. But BlackBerry-maker RIM sold just 13 million, down from 15 million in the final quarter of 2010.

RIM's business was impacted by delays to the release of its new Blackberry 10 platform, Gartner noted, adding that RIM's real challenge is to "expand the developer base around its ecosystem and convince developers to work and innovate with BlackBerry 10."

Meanwhile, Finnish handset maker Nokia's market share collapsed from 32% in last quarter of 2010 to just 12% in the same period of 2011.

Gartner analyst Roberta Cozza suggested that Nokia's slide was down to poor brand image and Europe's slow economy, adding that although Nokia proved its ability to execute and deliver on time with its handsets, more would be required to compete with Apple and Android.

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Sales of handsets running Android and iOS more than doubled year on year, leaving Google with a 51% market share in Q4 2011 compared to Apple's 24%.

RIM recently appointed Thorsten Heins as its new CEO in January, taking over from co-CEOs and founders Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie. Heins faces an uphill battle as RIM tries to recover from sliding sales and a severe service outage in September that left Blackberry users without message capability.

Smartphone market share by operating system, 2009-2011

Source: Gartner

Comments [2]

John Pineo
Friday 17th February 2012

I don't understand why people who analyze this stuff continue to mix up hardware and software? It's not fair to lump Apple and RIM in with every other hardware maker who uses Android OS? To be fair you should show RIM up against Motorola, Nokia, Samsung not Android! Come on it's very basic....you can do it!

Daniel York
Wednesday 22nd February 2012

I think the key distinction I can draw from your comment, John, is that RIM exclusively sell BB OS on their hardware, as do Apple with iOS. As such, for RIM and Apple, their software choices is as crucial as their hardware choices and developing an excellent product in both areas has to be a challenging process. It could be argued that Apple has succeeded in this whereas RIM have not. Now they are starting to see the pinch and where BBX has not yet surfaced, consumers and sales people alike are likely dissuaded from investing and recommending older BB OS phones in lieu of BBX.

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