J’son & Partners Consulting has published a detailed overview of the mobile device market in Russia: smartphone sales figures, mobile OS market segmentation and the harsh truth about tablets in our country.
According to the company’s analysts, a year ago the share of the Russian smartphone market from the world was 1.6%. The share of smartphone sales from the total share of sales of mobile handsets in Russia was 20% against 31% in the world. According to the forecast of J’son & Partners Consulting for the current year, the share of smartphones from sales will creep up to 30%. In the world, it, in turn, will rise to 39%.
In this regard, we are seriously lagging behind not only the United States, where smartphones will account for 59% of mobile sales in 2012, but also China with its 56%. But the Russian market is overtaking the Indian one, where smartphones will account for only 6%.
The company’s analysts explain the lagging of our market from the Western one by the “weak development of subsidy schemes“, as well as “a relatively low share of operators in the mobile phone sales market“. On the one hand, it’s hard not to agree with J’son & Partners Consulting. On the other hand, China’s lack of subsidies will not prevent it from providing about 1/3 of global smartphone sales this year, according to Canalys.
Analysts at J’son & Partners also provided detailed statistics on smartphone sales in Russia. According to these data, from January 2011 to the third quarter of 2012 inclusive, 16.5 million smartphones were sold in our country (8.1 million last year). According to J’son & Partners Consulting, sales of “smart phones” by the end of 2012 will amount to 12.6 million, thereby slightly overtaking sales of personal PCs and laptops.
Of the 3.4 million smartphones sold in Russia in the third quarter of 2012, 2 million were on Android devices. This is 62% of the entire market. Another 14% or about 476 thousand smartphones sold were on iOS. Symbian still has a significant share in our country – 15%, Bada – 12% and Windows Phone – 5%.
In their research, J’son & Partners Consulting specialists did not limit themselves, as last time, only to analyzing the smartphone market, but also touched on the tablet segment. According to the company, about 1.8 million “tablets” were sold in Russia from the first quarter of 2011 to the second quarter of this year.
Moreover, only in the last year, domestic retailers managed to sell about 300 thousand devices. The most curious thing is that 65% of them work on Android and only 29% on iOS. In the world, if anyone does not know, the situation is reversed: 68% for iOS and 26% for Android.
And now the most important thing. It is difficult for us to judge whether the company took into account the sales of gray devices, but most likely not. This means that the figures presented, although representative, may differ by an order of magnitude from the real ones.