Nokia Remains Top Handset Maker, but for How Long?

Nokia’s platform may be burning and the company may be rushing to bring its first Windows Phone handsets to market, but it remained the leading mobile phone manufacturer in the second quarter.

New metrics from research outfit Gartner, which measures handset sales to end users rather than handsets shipped into the channel, show Nokia selling 97.9 million mobile devices in the second quarter, for a 22.8 percent market share. That’s down from the 30.3 percent share it claimed in the year prior, but still far more than the 16.3 percent held by its nearest rival, Samsung. LG and Apple trailed far behind the pair, with 5.7 percent and 4.6 percent shares respectively.

The smartphone market, however, was another matter entirely. There, devices running Google’s Android OS hold a commanding lead with a 43.4 percent share of the market, up from 17.2 percent in the year prior. Nokia’s share is a little more than half that, with handsets running Symbian claiming 22.1 percent, down from 40.9. Meanwhile, Apple’s iOS holds an 18.2 percent share, up from 14.1 percent; and Research In Motion’s Blackberry OS has an 11.7 percent share, down from 18.7 percent.

So Nokia managed to hold some of its ground in the second quarter, despite ceding a lot of it to rivals. But it’s growing increasingly more difficult for it to do so, as that year-over-year drop — 40.9 percent to 22.1 percent — shows.

“The sales efforts of the channel, combined with Nokia’s greater concentration in retail and distributors’ sales, saw Nokia destock more than 9 million units overall and 5 million smartphones, helping it hold on to its position as the leading smartphone manufacturer by volume,” Gartner analyst Roberta Cozza said. “However, we will not see a repeat of this performance in the third quarter of 2011, as Nokia’s channel is pretty lean.”

[Image credit: visionshare/Flickr]