Nokia Slips to Seventh Position in Smartphone Market

Nokia, who was once a pioneer and market leader in the mobile phone market has slipped to seventh place in the smartphone segment in the third quarter of 2012 as per Gartner’s latest research report. This comes at a time when Apple and Samsung are both consolidating their leading positions in the smartphone segment. Nokia was maintaining the third position till the end of the second quarter. However due to decline in the sales of Nokia smartphones, they lost their third position to RIM with the fourth position now going to HTC.

Anshul Gupta, Principal Research Analyst at Gartner stated that it is not Nokia who is hitting the bottom. Both RIM and HTC have also witnessed decline in sales as compared to the previous quarters. Gartner also predicts tough days ahead for all these 3 players and they will find it difficult to hold on to their current sales figures and market share in the coming quarters.

Nokia sold only 7.2 million smartphones during the third quarter which accounted to almost 4.3% of the 169.2 million smartphones being sold. The timing of this research report is quite interesting as Nokia is all set to launch its much hyped new Lumia models including Lumia 920 and Lumia 820.

Nokia now seems to be taking a completely different approach with the sales efforts focusing primarily only on fewer markets having tied up with smaller number of mobile operators. Stephen Elop, Nokia Corporation Chief Executive was stated as saying, “The primary competition I’m worried about is not some other Windows phone product. I’m more focused on Android and iPhone.”

Nokia is currently under financial losses and the company is optimistic in regaining the market share it had in the smartphone segment with the launch of its new Lumia range of devices running on the Windows platform.