Nokia's mobile market share down to 25%

Nokia's share of the mobile phone market dropped to 25 percent in the first quarter of 2011, the lowest for 14 years, down from 30.6 percent at the same time last year, said technology research group Gartner.

"Its market share declined 5.5 percentage points year-on-year, and its share has reached its lowest since 1997," Gartner said in a study.

Nokia had released its own figures on April 21 putting first-quarter market share at 29 percent, down from 33 percent in the first quarter of 2010.

Earlier this year, the company announced a radical restructuring to overcome increasingly fierce competition in the smartphone market.

The Finnish company, which had a global market share of 40 percent as late as 2008, nonetheless remains the mobile industry leader.

It still ranking well ahead of second-place Samsung, which holds 16 percent, followed by LG in third with 5.6 percent, Apple in fourth with 3.9 percent and RIM with 3.0 percent.

Nokia announced in February that it expected a "period of uncertainty" as it phased out its Symbian platform in favour of a tie-in with Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system for its smartphones.

But Gartner said the Finnish company was still taking a beating in the rapidly growing smartphone sector, pointing out that "Android and Apple's iOS continued to dominate the smartphone operating system wars."

"Smartphones accounted for 23.6 percent of overall sales in the first quarter of 2011, an increase of 85 percent year-on-year," said Roberta Cozza, Gartner's principal research analyst.

Worldwide mobile phone devices sales meanwhile increased by 19 percent year-on-year, according to Gartner's data, totalling 427.8 million units sold in the first quarter.

The research group said it expected the total number of mobile phone sold worldwide this year to tick in at nearly 1.8 billion units.

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