Apple shipped about 125,000 iPhones to Australia in the first two and a half months after the device went on sale on 11 July last year, analyst firm IDC said today.
Apple shipped about 125,000 iPhones to Australia in the first two and a half months after the device went on sale on 11 July last year, analyst firm IDC said today.
(Credit: CNET.com)
"I wasn't expecting the number to be that high," IDC
telecommunications market analyst Mark Novosel told
ZDNet.com.au this week, noting he had thought it would be more in the realm
of 50 to 100 thousand for the quarter to 30 September.
As for the reason, Novosel put it all down to hype. "Basically
there was so much hype in the market. Australians had been waiting
for one and a half years." The fact that Optus had such reasonably
priced plans exacerbated the buying frenzy, Novosel said.
Novosel could not give comparative figures for other handsets,
since his information was by manufacturer. Despite
this, he said the iPhone was most likely the top seller.
Apple's shipped iPhone numbers accounted for 5.8 per cent of the Australian market in the period. Nokia's
combined phones held the top place of the manufacturer's table at 48.1 per cent,
followed by Samsung at 18.8 per cent and Sony Ericsson at 8.9 per cent, pushing out
the formerly third-placed LG.
This put the number of handsets shipped for those
manufacturers at around 1.03 million, 402,000 and 190,000 respectively.
The total number of handsets shipped was 2.14 million.
This number is more than double the totals of RIM, HTC and Motorola, who are all established players in the converged device market.
IDC analyst Mark Novosel
"[The iPhone's market share was] not a huge number in its own right," Novosel said, "but
considering it is the first quarter that Apple entered the market, it is a very strong
start. This number is more than double the totals of RIM, HTC and Motorola,
who are all established players in the converged device market."
Apple was not the only vendor achieving success. Year on year, Sony Ericsson has
achieved a 110 per cent increase on shipped handsets and HTC a whopping 928 per cent increase.
Despite these wins, the overall mobile market saw contraction over the quarter: a
reduction of 16.9 per cent from the previous quarter, which had seen 2.58 million devices enter the country.
The worst was likely yet to come, Novosel believed. "With some
vendors already raising prices of consumer goods, the full effect
of the slump in the Australian dollar, which fell as much as 39 per
cent during the third quarter, will not be felt until late in the
first quarter of 2009," he said.
IDC has predicted that shipments will fall 3.9 per cent this
year due to the financial uncertainty and possibility of a local
recession.
The growth in the number of people buying smartphones, which has recently
sat at high levels, will be throttled down this year,
Novosel said, although he expected people's obsession with
touchscreen and data-centric devices to continue.
