Nokia : Worlds Largest Computer Maker

Nokia: World’s Largest Computer Maker

Posted by Sam Churchill on December 29th, 2008

Nokia has become the world’s largest computer maker, says Tomi T Ahonen, author of Communities Dominate Brand. And not by its sales of all phones, only by counting smartphones.

“If you accept the premise that smartphones are computers, (as Nokia calls the N-Series or as Apple calls the iPhone), then the numbers are clear, says analyist Ahonen. For 2008, for the first time, the world’s largest computer maker is Nokia, not HP or Dell or Lenovo, etc. Apple jumps up to number 4 if we add the iPhone, and RIM clocks in at number 7, ahead of Toshiba who invented the laptop.”

If you say smartphones are computers then the biggest computer makers in the world in 2008 are:

Nokia — 64.1 Million units — 13.8% market share
HP — 55.2 Million units — 11.9% market share
Dell — 43.8 Million units — 9.4% market share
Apple — 35.0 Million units — 7.5% market share
Acer — 30.8 Million units — 6.6% market share
Lenovo — 22.1 Million units — 4.7% market share
RIM — 19.8 Million units — 4.2% market share
Toshiba — 12.9 Million units — 2.8% market share
Others — 181.9 Million units — 39.1% market share
Total — 465.5 Million units — 100.0%

His numbers are based on public figures reported by Gartner, IDC, Analsys etc. Ahonen says Nokia claimed three years ago that the N-Series were multimedia computers and Steve Jobs said earlier this year that the iPhone was Apple’s Netbook, so Ahonen does not claim his take is unique or completely original. He just gathered the data.

Worldwide smartphone sales totaled 32.2 million units in the second quarter of 2008, a 15.7 per cent increase from the second quarter of 2007, according to market researcher Gartner. Smartphones are currently about 15 percent of the entire mobile phone market, but are predicted to grow to 40 to 50 percent within the next five years. Informa forecasts subscriptions to UMTS/HSPA will number nearly half a billion worldwide by the end of 2009, and will pass the one billion mark in 2012.

Mobile Data Traffic by Application is expected to shift to video and internet access.

Tomi Ahonen has a follow-up blog story which compares five eras in computer evolution, and shows how the smartphone fits (or doesn’t fit) the pattern. According to Ahonen, a widely quoted expert, at the end of 2008 there were:

3.9 Billion mobile subscriptions globally
3.4 Billion actual phones in use
3.0 Billion unique mobile phone owners
3.0 Billion active users of SMS, 1.9 B cameraphones in use, and 1.3 B active users of MMS.
1.0 Billion mobile subscribers use the mobile internet (including WAP in the definition)

To put those numbers in context, he says there are 800 million cable/satellite TV subscriptions and 850 million cars. There are 950 million personal computers, about 1.2 people use email, and 1.3 billion total internet users. There are about 1.2 billion fixed landline phones, all television sets on the planet number 1.4 billion, and there are about 1.5 billion unique credit card holders.