Nokia currently estimates that Devices & Services net sales in the first quarter 2012 were EUR 4.2 billion, comprised of Mobile Phones net sales of EUR 2.3 billion (71 million units), Smart Devices net sales of EUR 1.7 billion (12 million units),
We don't have the total number of Samsung shipments, however estimates exist. They range between 41 and 44 million smartphones and 44 and 47 million feature phones. The low end of that range would imply Samsung shipped 85 million phones.
Nokia's press release indicates that it shipped 83 million.
This would be the first quarter that Samsung beat Nokia in total phone shipments. It had already overtaken Nokia in sales volume and profitability last year but this is the most cited metric of market performance: being the biggest in volume. Here is the tale of the shipments:
How did this happen?
The answer should become visible when we look at at another set of data. If we split the smartphones from feature phones the charts look like this:
Looking at product mix, Samsung growth is shown to be almost entirely due to smartphones while Nokia's stagnant growth seems to be a failure to have any smartphone traction.
It's even more clear when showing the above mixes of devices as percents of total.
As a percent of total, Nokia has shrunk its smartphone business from a peak of 24% in Q3 2010 to 14% last quarter. In the same time frame Samsung's smartphone share of portfolio has exploded from 10% to nearly 50%.
Note that both companies have seen non-smart device volumes contracting. Samsung's level is approximately the same as it had in late 2007 and Nokia's is lower than at any point in the last six years (perhaps longer).
So the answer to the question of how Samsung beat Nokia is told in the following chart:
Samsung was able to convert its portfolio to smartphones while Nokia failed to do so. This is the sort of transition that can only come about from an explicit strategic intention on the part of management. Market demand can steer you in any number of directions, but a vision of a future should provide the compass for making the big bets.
The bet Nokia made many years ago was that there would be a continuing, substantial business in the "low end". And low end meant feature phones. This strategy was still in evidence last year under the moniker "the next billion" users. The decisions were not driven by whether the products would be hired for different jobs, but that they would hit different price points. In other words, segmentation of customers by their ability to pay for devices rather than categorization of the jobs they hired mobile devices to do.
Perhaps Samsung was no wiser, but they were more pragmatic. Being non-dogmatic meant being flexible. They ran with off-the-shelf technologies and managed a transition to smart devices faster than anyone expected. It may not be a perfect strategy but it beat a bad strategy.
Nielsen has already noted that more than half of US consumers have smartphones. comScore's data seems to point to that threshold being crossed sometime this year.
If that point is crossed then it would mark the smartphone as one of the most rapidly adopted consumer technologies of all time. I plotted the time it took for a set of technologies to reach 50% penetration of US households.
I also showed the time it took for some of the technologies to reach 80% penetration.
The obvious question is how long will it take for smartphones to reach saturation in the US. Saturation level would be above 80% for individuals but closer to 100% for households. A conservative estimate would be another seven years. An aggressive estimate would be five years. That implies that between 2017 and 2019 smartphones will be the only mobile phones Americans will use. That would be equivalent to a user population of about 300 million.
Note that some like Internet and home computers have not reached 80% penetration in the US.[1] [2] When or whether smartphones will overtake computer penetration in the US is an open question. I believe that, like cellphones have in other markets, smart devices will overtake computer consumption and thus penetration and even bandwidth consumption.
There are significant technical and marketing challenges for reaching the "second half" of the market, but, as in all the other technologies listed above the incentives are in place to overcome these challenges. What's most remarkable about smartphones is the speed with which obstacles are overcome. For such a complex and inter-dependent technology, the speed of adoption and value creation is unprecedented.
The value network creation rate is also staggering. The App Industry went from inception to billion dollar valuations in a matter of three years. Entirely new business models and experiences are being created almost daily. What used to be a glacial process of innovation diffusion can now be observed in near real-time.
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Notes:
The question of when smartphones began penetrating the US is somewhat debatable. I contend it was either 2004 or 2005 when the BlackBerry and Treo brands began to be widely available. Although there were smartphones in production as early as 2001 (or even 1998 if we choose to include the GeOS based Nokia Communicator) their availability to US consumers was very limited.
In August 2007, during the HD format wars between HD-DVD and Blu-ray format, Toshiba offered Paramount and Dreamworks $150 million to produce HD versions of their movies exclusively as HD-DVD.[1]
This type of deal is equivalent to an "advance" offered to a book author. The DVD manufacturer pays studios up-front cash for the right to make its DVDs. From an accounting point of view this is treated as an advance that the manufacturer recovers by selling the DVDs back to the studio's video division in the same way a publisher earns back the advance it gives an author.
In this case, the payment was so large and the sales of HD-DVDs so small that Toshiba was unlikely to earn back the entire advance. The way the deal made any sense for Toshiba was that it was exclusive: the studios could not continue to release their movies in Blu-ray. The deal was done explicitly to hobble a competitor and create "critical mass" of content for its own format.
But then in March 2008, Toshiba threw in the towel and abandoned the HD-DVD format. The way the deal worked, the studios got to keep almost all of the $150 million. They then re-released all their movies in the Blu-ray format. The only "cost" to the $150 million windfall was that there was a nine month delay in the eventual release to Blu-ray--a small price to pay for an emergent format without a large install base.[2]
Platform owners go to great lengths to ensure "content" for their platform. They will, essentially, finance an ecosystem when there are barriers to entry or when competing ecosystems are far more lucrative.
This scenario for movies is being played again with Netflix, Hulu and other distributors who need to fill their pipelines. Netflix's content acquisition costs are exploding and putting the whole company's future in doubt.
But this scenario is also being played out with app developers. Most recently, news broke that developers are receiving payments from Microsoft for Windows Phone ports of popular apps. In mobile platforms, apps are the new content and developers are the new studios. It's also a practice that is not without precedent[3].
This is as it should be. The value of the platform lies mainly in what is built on top of it just like a foundation is not much use without a house on it. However, the practice of "priming the pump" with cash payments for porting is not ideal. Like spiffs, those who receive payments may become used to it and withhold development if there is no payment. Also, those who did not get payment offers may feel shunned and retaliate in kind. Those who receive payment may become cynical about it and may not put in the extra effort (or, more probably, outsource) to make the work spectacular.
Or, like Paramount, they may just take the money and run if/when the platform fails.
Paramount made $250 million more from three "replication output" deals: $50 million from Toshiba for agreeing to release Titanic on DVD in time for Christmas sales, $150 million from Panasonic for agreeing to allow them to take over video replication from Thompson, and $50 million from the law firm Ziffrin, Brittenham and Circuit City stores for agreeing to support the DIVX format. Paramount got to keep the money even though DIVX never launched.
Although it's never been reported that Apple pays developers for building iOS apps, some developers do benefit from promotional placement and visibility during launch events and from early access to devices or SDKs under development.
Philip Elmer-Dewitt published a table from Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster which has some interesting details. Munster has taken a four year "tech sector" view of value creation (and destruction) and tried to see if there is a bound on the value Apple can continue to capture. This "share of value" is one of many approaches to bounding an opportunity. You could consider "share of wallet" by measuring disposable income, or "share of eyeballs" by measuring screen time available or even "share of GDP".
The attractive part of the share of value of industry is that we have an implicit way to see winners and losers, or the transfer of wealth from one group to another. I charted the data published as follows:
Seen in this context, Apple generated nearly as much value[1] as RIM, Nokia, Sony, Dell, HP and Microsoft destroyed. The rest of the sector generated $233 billion of value but if it were not for Apple, the tech sector would have declined by $168 billion.
As a result, Apple went from being 5.6% of the value of the sector to being nearly 17%. The argument goes that its share of value could still increase further even if the overall sector does not. At 30% of current total value, Apple would be valued above $1 trillion.
My observation is that the conservation of value exhibited in this data is not the entire story. What is gained by Apple should be more than what is lost by others. The disruption under way has had victims but the net value created should be more than what they lost. The iPhone and iPad should be competing with non-consumption, bringing new value into the sector from other sectors or from non-productive capital. Perhaps they are and the losses by the cohort arrayed above are incidental, but there is likely to be a blend of competition and new market growth.
Does the analysis satisfy?
Perhaps. It's one more perspective into the puzzle. Growth rates, market sizes, technology improvements, brand and satisfaction analysis as well as jobs to be done are all offering perspective views. I would say there is consistency in the data but they should all be weighed with vigilance.
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Notes:
Market cap is the perceived net present value of all future cash flows discounted to the present for a publicly traded company and hence defines the value created by the firm. It's measured by markets so there is room for error but it's the best measure available and has historically been accurate over long periods.
Charles Arthur, writing for The Guardian, has noted that court filings seem to be revealing Google's Android revenues. If this is the case, we have a significant breakthrough in understanding the economics of Android and the overall mobile platform strategy of Google.
The new data is a reference to a settlement offer Google made to Oracle of $2.8 million and 0.515% of Android revenues on an ongoing basis. The key assumption to make this data useful is that the $2.8 million offer represents 0.515% of revenues to date.
In other words, that revenues from 2008 to end of 2011 multiplied by 0.00515 results in $2.8 million. That implies that revenues from 2008 to 2011 were $544 million.
I think that's a fair assumption. I don't see why Google would offer a higher or lower royalty rate for years 2008 through 2011 than for years after 2011. The offer would seem to be 0.0515% in the future as well as retroactively in the past.
If we work with this assumption then the next question is how to distribute this $544 million over the four years 2008 through 2011? The installed base of Android has grown exponentially and it would seem logical to assume that revenues have followed in a similar pattern. Here is a chart of installed base given activation data supplied by Google.
If we assume revenues were distributed the same way we would get something like this:
The sum of the bars in this chart equals $544 million and the ramp is approximately the same as the installed base. The relationship between the first graph and the second is a multiple equivalent to the revenue per device.
Therefore a second assumption is that revenue per device remained fairly constant. In this model the revenue comes out to be about $1.70 per device per year. It's possible that rev/dev/yr. is increasing as Google services are discovered by users. It's also possible that the rev/dev/yr. is decreasing as later adopters are less likely to engage as early users. I just don't know how to adjust this value so by leaving it at the average, I can avoid introducing more assumptions.
Now we can stop and look at this figure and do a test. Does $1.70 make sense as a device revenue for Android? Google had spoken about targeting $10/device/yr. but we have no indication that they are nearly at that level. If they did achieve that level, with an installed base of 300 million, Google could be collecting $3 billion a year in Android income. Are they getting it?
As of October, Google mentioned that it had a $2.5 billion "mobile run rate". But we know that this figure is not only from Android. Mobile includes all mobile devices and services including those running inside iOS, Symbian, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, etc. They could be counting ads on all mobile browsers as well as ads running inside all apps on all platforms. Furthermore, Google also testified that iOS accounts for two thirds of their mobile search revenues[1].
Adding run rate to the Android revenue chart results in the following:
So the step is to take the "run rate" figure of $2.5 billion and assume, as Charles Arthur did, that iOS income is what is left after taking out the Android part[2]. I also noted that Google previously mentioned a run rate of $1 billion and I will assign that run rate to 2010 and $2.5b to all of 2011. Since we know the number of iOS devices in use for years 2010 and 2011 we can calculate Google's revenues per iOS device in use.
If we thus combine all the data we know (revenues derived from settlement offer, units in use, run rate and iOS installed base) we get the following revenue profile:
This shows a positive trend for Google: revenues per smartphone per year is increasing. However, the growth is coming from non-Android devices which means mostly iOS. Revenues per device for Android is probably declining.
The story for iOS revenues however is not all rosy for Google. Google has to pay for that revenue. The mechanism is a payment that Google makes to Apple for the prominent and default placement of Google search on Safari.
We don't know the terms of the arrangement but if we assume $2/device Google needs to shave $2 from the top of the chart above with that money going to Apple (attached as iPhone/iPad service revenues.)[3]
That still leaves a healthy $8.33 in 2011 as operating income from mobile with $1.70 or so coming from Android.
However, to make this operating income into bottom line profit, we have to extract the R&D and SG&A associated with mobile at Google. This would be, therefore, Andy Rubin's yearly budget.
Andy Rubin has stated in the past that Android is profitable. That is certainly believable. The budget would have to be about $400 million/year in 2011.
Charles Arthur concluded that Google obtains four times more revenue from iOS than from Android. My estimates indicate that in 2011 the revenue ratio was closer to 5 but if we subtract the cost of those sales in the form of payments to Apple then the ratio could well be four to one.
Many of these figures begin to "hang together" as we balance assumptions about costs, revenues and statements made in public. There is a consistency within a comfortable margin of error. If that is the case, then the economics of Android begins to take shape.
My take is that it's not a bad business. But it's also not a great one. As long as there is exponential growth in units, Android will improve its position inside Google relative to iOS. But from Google's perspective, iOS is today a bigger business. And iOS is not standing still. It's growing not only in terms of units but in revenue per unit.
Strategically, and historically Android was never one thing. P&L considerations were not the only (or even at all) factors in investment for Google. Having a hedge against hegemony of potential rivals, having a means to learn and develop new business and having a role in defining the post-PC computing paradigm are all probably bigger considerations than profitability.
So in terms of returns, Android is sustainable. However, in relative terms the value created leaves much to be desired. Whereas Android generates $1.70/device/year and thus an Android device with a two year life generates about $3.5 to Google over its life, Apple obtained $576.3 for each iOS device it sold in 2011[4]. The economics of Android are nothing like the economics of iOS.
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Notes:
This figure is also not conclusive as search is not the only form of revenue on a mobile device but it does imply that Android is not the majority of Google's mobile revenues.
Clearly this is overstating iOS as the non-Android income is broken up between several platforms. We can only say that iOS is the vast majority of non-Android income.
Assuming a $2/device payment model means Google paid $312 million to Apple in 2011 and $171 million in 2010. This would go toward boosting Apple's revenue per iOS device. Naturally, if this distribution cost is higher or would be subject to re-negotiation then it could vary widely.
The iOS figure includes accessories and licensing of trademarks but excludes income from App Store, iTunes music, movies, TV shows, iBooks, greeting cards or textbooks.
RIM’s CEO, Thorsten Heins was quoted as saying, “We plan to refocus on the enterprise business and capitalize on our leading position in this segment. We believe that BlackBerry cannot succeed if we tried to be everybody’s darling and all things to all people. Therefore, we plan to build on our strength.”
RIM's latest quarterly results show a continuation of the decline in sales that began in Q1 2011.
Here are the highlights:
Smartphone units declined 26% y/y and 21% sequentially. Over a four year period the company still shows a positive growth of 20% compounded, though that is far below industry average
The smartphone revenues were down 29% y/y and 23% sequentially.
Including service revenues, the revenue per smartphone dropped to $346, a drop of 4%.
I estimate the phone operating margin to be less than 5%. The company swung to a net negative operating margin due to write-downs of tablet inventory but the phone business managed to break even.
Operating income from phone operations dropped to the lowest level in five years.
The company is still generating cash flow and has a cash reserve of over $2 billion.
Seen in isolation, the company is clearly struggling but does not seem to be on its last legs. But no company should be seen in isolation. As part of a competitive market, the company is in far worse shape. The following chart shows the AMP index which measures relative performance through a blend of market shares.
This chart does not include the latest quarterly data but if it did it would be sure to show a continuing decline. The AMP index actually shows RIM peaking in Q1 2009, well before the volumes peaked.
It's within this context that we need to evaluate the new CEO's strategic shift. In the quote above we have the first significant strategic departure and split from the past. Should it inspire hope or despair?
The idea of focus has huge benefits. Focus and the art of saying no are keys to greatness. However, you only succeed if you focus on the right thing. "Enterprise" is not the right thing. It's not a valid target. Enterprise support is a feature, not a product. I don't mean that as opinion, but as a point of fact. Focus on a set of customers whose only characteristic is a job description is missing the whole point of focus.
Focus needs to be positioned on a job a brand needs to be hired to do. The idea should be to solve an open problem which is either too complex or too uneconomical for anyone else to solve. Corporate buyers have problems to solve but the BlackBerry no longer offers unique or defensible solutions. Furthermore, corporate buyers are themselves being dis-intermediated from the computing purchase decision. Sometimes this process is called "consumerization" but it is more plainly explained as "commoditization". The selection of tools for workers by a group that claims to understand their needs better than they do is an archaic concept.
This was true even in 2005 when RIM began targeting consumers. It was then that they saw the writing on the wall--that their enterprise business was being commoditized. All of RIM's growth since has been in consumer segments. By abandoning that trajectory RIM is effectively giving up on growth. And giving up on growth is simply giving up.
With the launch of the Wii console, Nintendo averted disaster. When the Wii launched in late 2006 Nintendo had been facing the simultaneous attack from the "seventh generation" Xbox 360 which launched a year earlier as well as the PlayStation 3, both of which set as their bases of competition 3D graphics at HD resolutions. Many wrote off the company and called the console market a two horse race.
Then, in what seemed a desperate downward leap, the Wii was launched into a different trajectory. It addressed non-consumers with a new, more intuitive controller and standard resolution rather than competing for hardcore gamers with more power and richer graphics.
Because the Wii was asymmetric and addressed non-consumption rather than trying to be a "better" console in what was becoming a horsepower race, Nintendo expanded the console market. Its innovation was interesting enough that many hard core gamers used the console in addition to a PS3 or Xbox and many non-gamers bought it as their first console.
The result is that 95 million Wii's have been sold vs. 66 million Xbox 360's and 62 million PS3's.
The effect of the Wii introduction on Nintendo's console unit sales is shown below (pink line).
The graph above shows that the growth from Wii has stopped. In fact, the console has been in decline since early 2009. Fortunately for Nintendo, the company also developed a mobile strategy. Learning from its Game Boy device, its DS series of portable game consoles allowed the company to diversify its portfolio. The graph also shows the total portable units sold in blue.
However, this strategy has not been enough to protect the company from the disruptive effect of mobile computing. As the following chart shows, each new generation of portable from Nintendo has failed to break out of a general pattern of overall decline.
Contrast the DS product patterns with the iPod touch and iPad--multi-purpose products whose game functionality is "good enough" but whose communications and general-purpose app catalogs are re-defining the basis of competition yet again.
Nintendo bet on the 3DS to reboot the franchise. The 3DS product does show the characteristic initial spike in adoption but the level it launched at is far lower than the level of the iPad. Nintendo has a big hill to climb to even recover the volumes it held in 2009. In contrast, the usurper Apple's volumes are doubling each year.
When products are compared as "ramps" in terms of growth post-launch the story becomes even clearer.
Although the iPhone and iPod touch ramped in similar ways[1] to the gaming platforms, iPad took an entirely different path. The 3DS benefited temporarily from a price cut but it seems to be returning to a well-worn trajectory.
The data points a bleak picture for Nintendo. The Wii was a success due to its competitiveness vs. non-consumption of gaming. But another low end disruption took hold in 2007. Good enough games on phones and mobile computers are taking consumption away from dedicated consoles, both fixed and mobile.
In addition, the rate at which game experiences are improving on iOS imply that they will overtake the "quality" of consoles in the not too distant future. Differences in distribution models also guarantee lower pricing for software for end users and enabling a far larger catalog of titles.[2]
This may sound like another story of fortune gained and fortune lost. The inevitable "what goes up must come down" aphorism. We become used to this pattern and assume it to be axiomatic. But there are causes for each success and causes for each failure.
The lesson here is that a company that disrupts does not necessarily survive. Long term survival depends on the ability for serial disruption. Serial disruption is an uncomfortable state for an organization to exist in. As the story above shows, disruptions are usually enabled by "desperate" necessity. Desperation is not something management is trained to aspire for.
What management strives for is steady state satisfaction and predictability from intelligent planning.
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Notes:
Though the iPhone ramp matched the consoles, the growth for the iPhone is persisting at 100% y/y five years into the product. This means it is outstripping all console installed bases by at least a factor of 2.
The catalog is not only broad but deep in the sense that there are many new game concepts and experiments being tried. The app store is a vast testbed for game and entertainment ideas.
At last year's iPad 2 launch, I compared the specs of the newly announced iPad with those of a laptop and desktop from five years earlier. This year I am comparing the new iPad with Apple's computers from four years earlier:
The new iPad now exceeds the total display resolution, has similar speed and storage capacity while having twice the battery life of the thinnest laptop of four years ago. It also has very high quality cameras and GPS and cellular network connectivity which have yet to appear on mainstream PCs. It's still a lot smaller and half the price and has a larger selection of available software titles at prices a fraction of its elder cousin.
The only value that a desktop of 2008 has over a new iPad is the size of the screen and a larger hard drive.
The point is not so much that the usurper is a "better" computer but that it has come from non-existence to being a contender in two years. It is also narrowing the gap to its comparable ancestors by one year, every year. Arguably that gap now stands at four years.
I began by projecting growth rates of various market participants including the leading Windows PC makers (HP, Acer, Dell, Lenovo and Asus), the combined "others" and the Mac. I also added the iPad, Samsung's tablets, other Google sanctioned Android tablets and Amazon. I also projected a split between traditional and tablet Windows shipments.
The underlying assumptions are:
Mac growth continues at 25% as it has on average for a few years
Windows grows slightly in 2012 with the introduction of Windows 8 late in the year. However I anticipate Windows 8, including tablet versions, to mostly be upgrades with slow enterprise take-up within this time frame.
The tablet versions of Windows begin shipping in Q4 2012 with 7% of total Windows shipped. The ratio reaches 20% by end of 2013.
iPad growth will flatten for '12 and '13 at 100%, similar to iPhone's historic performance.
Android tablet growth will be significant in the current year and follow iPad growth pattern though settling at 80% during '13.
Amazon growth will be approximately 80%.
Building the platforms combined growth bottom-up gives the following forecast for the next two years (and historic growth shown for perspective.)
[FF = form factor]
Given these assumptions, the day when the tablet market (by units) will exceed that of traditional PCs will come sometime in the fall of 2013.
As yesterday's post noted, the tablet market will be additive. This can be seen in the vendor shipments forecast that accompanies the model:
When cellular phones emerged in the 1980’s wireline phone service was excellent. Penetration was at 99 percent in the United States and prices had never been cheaper. The industry was deregulated and phone companies were competing fiercely over long distance calling plans. In contrast, the new cellular phones were not “good enough” on the basis of what was considered necessary for making critically important phone calls.
Sound quality was poor, coverage was spotty and battery life measured in minutes. But they allowed a whole new consumption model of communication to emerge. They allowed a caller to call a person not just a place. Over time, this simple value proposition caused a powerful profit formula to emerge. That formula led to extremely rapid improvement in the quality of the network and devices that connected to it.
It caused such a cataclysmic change that twenty years hence it became possible (even natural) for consumers to “cut the cord” and abandon wireline communications altogether. The “excellent quality” wireline industry was dead to be replaced by the "good enough" wireless industry.
One consequence of mobile telephony was increased consumption. Voice call minutes increased dramatically because calling could happen anytime from any place. While overall consumption increased, landline use decreased. Then came messaging of various types. Forms of communication enabled by cellular networks that simply did not exist before with landlines.
As a result there were vast pools of profits available to telcos that seemed to appear out of nowhere. SMS and data plan income was beyond anyone's ability to forecast in the 1980s.
The same phenomenon is happening with smartphones. Consider a proxy measure: operating profits from mobile phones since the iPhone launched, illustrated below.
Although Apple went on to capture 75% of the profits, it did so from a vastly expanded profit pool. A similar picture emerges from an illustration of revenues:
Another way to visualize the evolution of the market is to look at the combined price, profit margin and volume areas for the fourth quarters of 2009, 2010 and 2011.
Scanning from top to bottom, you can see how volumes grew, revenues grew and profits both grew and were re-allocated among participants (each colored pixel in the charts above is equal to about $1 million.)
These charts illustrate that there is no "law of conservation of profits" in any market as long as there is sufficient innovation. This is because the there is no "law of conservation of value created". If value is presented, buyers will gladly trade cash for it. Conversely, if there is no value-generating innovation, growth stops and competition reduces to a zero-sum game.
One of the most exciting aspects of disruptive growth is that although it tends to transfer profits from incumbents to entrants, it also grows the size of the overall market. Sometimes the growth is significant.
The latest data from Google shows that the Android activation rate is increasing at a relatively steady rate (i.e. acceleration is constant). The data provided so far is in the blue circles below. The green line is the interpolation and extrapolation of that data.
As the graph is projected forward we get an activation rate of one million per day by mid August of this year. If it continues then we could see 1.5 million per day by end of 2013.
The corresponding number of cumulative activations is shown on the following log chart (with blue circles showing the actual data and the green estimates.)
The forecast is therefore that Android activations will cross one billion by November 2013.
The following chart compares the growth ramps of the various mobile operating systems indexed from the same starting points (measured in quarters after launch).
If Android does keep accelerating at the same rate then it will reach a billion users in five years. Of course, this total will not be a unified ecosystem in that many versions of Android will be co-existing. There will also be additional variants of Android which will not include Google services (these are not included in the totals above) which will compete to some degree with this platform.
However, it's still an amazing story. The crucial question is whether the billion Android phones will have an effect on the opportunity for new entrants like Windows Phone and future BlackBerry variants as well as Bada and other Linux-based platforms.
The answer is that there will be well over 6 billion mobile "connections" by the end of 2013. ITU reports that "By the end of 2010, there will be an estimated 5.3 billion mobile cellular subscriptions worldwide, including 940 million subscriptions to 3G services." It follows then that if this forecast is correct then by the end of 2013, Android will have about 17% penetration of the connections market.
