Look Out, Global Smartphone Market To Hit $150B by 2014

By Doug Allen

With the huge surge in sales for smartphones driven by a wide range of customer apps delivered from a handheld mobile platform, it may not be too surprising to see optimistic, if not wildly enthusiastic, projections for the smartphone market, but global market research and consulting firm MarketsandMarkets has pegged total worldwide smartphone sales to hit $150.3 billion yes, billion by 2014.

The firms new report touts that figure based on a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.15 percent between 2009 and 2014, and finds devices with the Symbian and Blackberry OS will drive 32.2 percent and 18.9 percent of total revenues, respectively.

Geographically, Europe is taking the biggest piece of the market share pie at 37.2 percent; Asia-Pacific is close behind, driven by high adoption rates in China and India, with $17.1 billion. The region is expected to hit $45.2 billion by 2014, with a CAGR of 18.6 percent over the same period. North America and the Rest of the World come in third and fourth, respectively. In relatively more saturated markets, such as the United States and Europe, smartphone growth has been driven by carrier price wars and operators subsidies, the report said.

Presently, smartphones account for 14 percent of the global mobile phone market, the firm said. Significantly, the global smartphones market was not appreciably impacted by the economic slowdown, garnering growth rates of 12.8 percent from 2008 to 2009. Total growth is expected to grow by 26 percent over last year to reach $69.8 billion by the end of this year.

The key drivers to such strong customer adoption include new or improved capabilities in high-speed Internet access, sophisticated personal and professional data management, and the emergence of 3G and 4G technologies enabling a wide and growing variety of personal applications, essentially making the smartphone a portable development platform that can be easily customized and adopted to myriad uses.

The scope of the report covers a range of operating systems, including Symbian, Blackberry, Windows, iPhone OS, Android, Linux, Web OS and others, as well as devices that span consumer and business phones and those that vary by input method (touchscreen, keyboard, and keypad).

Consumer smartphones are outpacing business smartphones in terms of sales, with the former accounting for nearly 75 percent of global smartphone revenues. However, thats not likely to continue as business adoption is expected to grow more quickly as businesses continue to adopt their operations for the mobile enterprise.

Across all smartphones, the touchscreen has emerged as the most popular interface, making up 39.6 percent of smartphones sold; those with keypad input lag behind at 31.2 percent.