Apple Now a Top 5 Phone Manufacturer!
Apple has now crashed into the Top 5 of global handset makers! It was just a year ago that Apple entered the top 10 handset makers, as the second of the ‘pure smartphone makers’ to enter the chart where obviously the cheaper dumbphones would dominate due to their volumes of sales. But now Apple has leapfrogged RIM, and it depends essentially on ZTE performance, on whether Apple is 4th or 5th, and whether the last of the top 5 is ZTE or RIM. But Apple is definitely now one of the world’s 5 largest mobile phone manufacturers. This is an astonishing achievement considering that they only make smartphones, that the unsubsidised price of the iPhone is about 5 times more than the average of all phones sold worldwide, and most of all, that Apple has managed this with only one new phone model released per year! (imagine how much more market success Apple would have, if the decided to expand their product line and introduce say a lower cost ’iPhone Nano’ model and release two new phones per year..)
Tomi Ahonen’s analysis is, as usual, spot on. Just yesterday I was talking to someone about how Apple was, despite being a “top 10″ manufacturer of mobile phones, was making substantially more profit on smartphones than any other manufacturer.
Now I know they’re in the top 5 globally, and I suspect it’s only a matter of time before they hit the top 3. That has to be scary to my friends at Nokia, who are still the top manufacturer by a long shot, but are slowly but surely continuing to lose ground to Apple.
