Smart Phone Sales

There's this Gartner report floating around about how smart phone sales are strong and cell phone sales as a whole are weak. Several bloggers who are either lazy, bad at math, or have an agenda have made hay of this article. Now anyone who has read this blog regularly knows that I think most "research" reports are self serving crap (I still remember one from 1989 that said 40% of Americans would be using interactive TV by 1994).

Here are the data points from the report:

There were 269.1 million cell phones sold. An 8.6% decrease year over year.
There were 36.4 million smart phones sold. A 12.7 percent increase year over year.

The problem is that comparing percentage changes when the scales are so far disparate is deceiving.

Smart phone sales went from 32,314,000 to 36,404,400. But making a significant percentage jump is easy when you only have relatively small numbers. If I sell 10 of something this month and 20 of it next month I am growing 100% month over month, but I still only sold 20 units.

The relevant statistic is this:

Smart phone sales went from 11% of the cell market to 13.5% of the cell market. Feature phone sales went from 89% of the market to 86.5% of the market.

Despite huge advertising campaigns, and massive free publicity, feature phones still outsell smart phones by about 7 to 1. So the title of the linked article "Smartphones Selling Far Better Than Dumb Ones" is blatantly not true.

BTW, Nokia sold the most smart phones by far:

Nokia 45.1%
Research In Motion 13.3%
Apple 5.3%
HTC 4.0%
Fujitsu 4.1%
Others 28.1%

Edit for clarity