Lucrative market in Asia for Android phones

By Alexander Villafania, loQal.ph

MAKATI CITY, METRO MANILA – Shipments of smartphones using Google’s Android operating system are expected to double in size in the next five years, reaching shipments of up to 200 million units for the Asia Pacific region alone, according to research firm Ovum.


In a report, Ovum says the smartphone market would grow to a compounded annual growth rate of 12.5 percent between 2010 and 2016. Smartphones alone would also account for 32 percent of the entire Asia Pacific mobile market. Ovum Principal Analyst Adam Leach said the smartphone market would perform the best among other mobile phone types in the market.

For the Asia Pacific market alone, Android is expected to get a 38.7 percent market share, followed by 22.6 percent from smartphones using Microsoft’s new Windows Mobile Phone operating system. At third place in terms of market share in the Asia Pacific region is Apple’s iOS at 19 percent. BlackBerry OS will have 9.2 percent. "The success of the Android platform is being driven by the sheer number of hardware vendors supporting it at both the high and low ends of the market,” Leach said.

The non-inclusion of the Symbian in the market share percentage forecast is quite a surprise, considering that Nokia’s operating system is still leading globally. But Leach said that the recent partnership between Nokia and Microsoft could cause a reduction in shipments of Symbian-based devices as the Finnish mobile giant transitions development from Symbian to Windows Phone. The Ovum 2016 forecast indicated that the Symbian OS will lose 46 percent of its market share until 2016. Leach said that the Nokia-Microsoft partnership would enable the Windows Phone operating system to become a mainstream platform.

However, he also warned that Microsoft might lose the interest of other handset makers who may choose not to compete with Nokia, which still dominates the overall mobile phone business. Previously, Nokia Philippines executives said that development in Symbian is ongoing even with the partnership with Microsoft. They are still expecting the Symbian to make long-term headway in the smartphone business.

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