Handsets such as the Nexus S will help Samsung overtake Nokia as the biggest smartphone vendor, according to analysts. Photograph: Albert Gea/Reuters
Samsung will become the world’s largest smartphone maker this quarter, overtaking the struggling Nokia, which has led the market since 1996, the analysts Nomura forecast on Monday.
Nomura also forecast that Apple will outpace the Finnish phone maker in the top end of the mobile market in the third quarter of this year, adding to its woes, which include dramatic cuts in its profit forecast and a downgrading of its credit rating.
Other analysts agreed that Nokia’s position as the top seller in smartphones is likely to be overtaken either in this quarter or the next.
Nomura is bullish about the prospects for Samsung, a Korean company which makes a broad range of electronic equipment, including smartphones running Google’s Android mobile operating system, Microsoft’s Windows Phone, and its own bada software.
In the first quarter of this year Nokia sold just over 24m smartphones worldwide, but it has since said that its mobile division is coming under pricing and sales pressure from rivals. Apple sold 18.7m iPhones in the first quarter of 2011, while Samsung sold 12.6m. But Samsung has been ramping up its production and shifting its focus to smartphones, which are more profitable than low-end handsets.
“Nokia looks set to relinquish its smartphone crown to Samsung and Apple,” Nomura analysts said in a research note. “Further emphasising the shift in power to Asia is our forecast for HTC to almost match Nokia during 2012.
”Nokia’s mobile division revenues and profits: what the analysts forecast Research firms Gartner and Canalys both said they saw Nokia – which created the smartphone market with its 1996 launch of the Communicator model – losing smartphone volume leadership later this year.
“If Nokia’s new phones [running Microsoft's Windows Phone software] are not well received in the third quarter and (with) the [Samsung] Galaxy S2 ramping up, Samsung might overtake them and become the smartphone leader in the third quarter,” said Carolina Milanesi, smartphone analyst for the research company Gartner.
Nokia has lost initiative in the smartphone market to Apple’s iPhone with its proprietary iOS operating system and Google’s Android devices, and at the lower end to more nimble Asian rivals such as ZTE.
Overall, Nokia still makes more cellphones than Samsung due to its strong position in basic cellphones and its wider distribution network in emerging countries. But analysts polled last week forecast that it will ship fewer than 100m phones a quarter this year for the first time since the beginning of 2009, and for only the second time since the end of 2006, as “white label” rivals begin to cut into its share of the wider business.
The company is abandoning its Symbian platform for smartphones over the next 18 months and switching to Microsoft’s software as part of an overhaul of its phone business set out in February by Stephen Elop, a Canadian formerly at Microsoft who was appointed chief executive in September.
On 31 May Nokia abandoned hope of meeting key annual and quarterly targets just weeks after setting them, raising questions over whether its new boss can deliver on the turnaround he promised.
Shares in Nokia were 0.6% firmer at €4.33 at the start of the day, in line with a slightly stronger technology sector.
