BlackBerry Overtaken by Windows Phone

It appears that the headaches simply continue to pound away at BlackBerry. An August 14, 2013 headline from CNET read “Windows Phone to BlackBerry: Nyah nayh!” Ouch! That has got to hurt. This comes after Windows Phone solidified its third place slot.

According to a report from the Gartner Group, Windows Phone securely took third place for the first time in 1Q 2013. This makes the second time in a row that Windows Phone outdid BlackBerry for 2Q 2013, thus securing a hold on third place.

The second quarter has Microsoft's mobile OS scoring a market share of 3.3 percent. This is up significantly from 2.6 percent from year's quarter. Shipments of Windows Phone handsets almost doubled jumping to 7.4 million from 4 million a year ago.

Nokia has a lot to do with this jump. Nokia has also been working hard to become a solid player once again. Back in February, the Mall of America decided to go with the Nokia Lumia 920 over BlackBerry as their smartphone of choice. This was another blow to BlackBerry.

While the market share for Windows Phone has gone up, BlackBerry’s market share has dropped dramatically from 5.2 percent to 2.7 percent in the same time period. Its shipments went down from 7.9 million to 6.1 million units.

This also comes on the heels of BlackBerry announcing that it is possible looking for either a buyer or a partner. Earlier this week, it formed a special committee to look into the possibilities of going private. We have seen that BlackBerry lost some major corporate and government accounts this year, including the above mentioned loss to Nokia. This has to have taken a toll on the company.

Although the Gartner Group has Windows Phone in third place with a 3.3 percent share, the Android platform maintains its first place slot with a 79 percent market share. While Apple did remain in second place with a 14.2 percent share, it did go down from 18.8 percent.

The following Gartner chart shows the breakdown:

Another interesting fact that came out of the report is that for the first time, data shows that smartphones outsold feature phones. Worldwide smartphone sales hit 225 million last quarter. This represents a 46.5 percent jump from the same quarter last year.

Over the same time period, feature phone sales fell to 210 million. This is a decline of 21 percent. Smartphones saw their biggest growth in the Asia/Pacific market at 74.1 percent, Latin America came in at 55.7 percent and Eastern Europe is at 31.6 percent.

We have seen that a lot of companies are starting to make lower end smartphones specifically geared for the emerging markets. So it should not come as too much of a surprise that smartphones have made the move of increased sales in these areas.

In a statement, Gartner research analyst Anshul Gupta said, "Smartphones accounted for 51.8 percent of mobile phone sales in the second quarter of 2013, resulting in smartphone sales surpassing feature phone sales for the first time."

In the big picture, mobile phone sales reached 435 million in the last quarter. This is a jump of 3.6 percent from the previous year. I think that we can see more companies creating smartphones with fewer features for the emerging markets.

Fewer features makes them more affordable and since the emerging markets are leading the way in m-commerce, mobile banking and new technologies we should see an even higher sales of smartphones in this area.