In the second quarter of 2011, Apple catapulted into the No. 1 position in the global smartphone market after Nokia posted a 31% decline in shipments, according to a new report by IHS iSuppli.
Nokia’s woes in the smartphone market are the result of a double whammy of rising competitive pressures on the outside—and struggles with its corporate strategy on the inside.
The Symbian software platform used by Nokia simply isn’t competitive against Apple’s iOS or the Android operating system used in phones from Samsung and HTC. Meanwhile, the company is facing major challenges throughout its entire mobile handset business—even outside the smartphone segment—which caused its sales to decline in most regions of the world in the second quarter.
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Facing strong competition from Apple, Samsung and HTC, Nokia posted the worst performance among the leading smartphone brands, with its shipments falling to 16.7 million units, down from 24.2 million in the first quarter. Nokia’s shipments also were down 30.4 percent from 24 million one year earlier, in the second quarter of 2010.
With the overall smartphone market expanding by 7.5 percent sequentially, Nokia’s share of shipments declined to 15.1 percent in the second quarter, down from 23.6 percent in the first quarter. Nokia’s smartphone shipments have regressed to their level of two years ago. This caused Nokia to fall to third place, losing the No. 1 ranking for the first time in the history of the smartphone business, the report concludes.