The Smartphone Revolution

Last year saw a record of  over 600 million smartphones out of about 1.6 billion phones shipped worldwide in what many see as a "Smartphone Revolution". Smartphones are getting more popular by the minute.

Android was the No. 1 smartphone operating system with 68.4% of the global smartphone market, followed by Apple's IOS and others (like Blackberry OS, Symbiam and Linux) and its increasing the gap.

 Android is up 13%, iOS down 7%, BlackBerry down 81% … and Windows Phone up a massive 52%. Android is now the favourite smartphone operating system. As a result of its affiliation with Android, Samsung has seen its phone sales soar and had 25% of mobile phone shipments in 2012. Other manufacturers of  Android based smartphones such as LG, HTC, Sony and Huawei also experienced growth in sales figures. Apple's IOS is now experiencing the the heat of competition from Android (Samsung) as its lost ground in its key markets in China and US due to the success of the Samsung Galaxy S3.
This battle for more market share will continue through 2013 global smartphone installed base is expected to grow by 33% this year and double in size by 2016. With projections that smartphones will be twice the number of feature phones coupled with its market share of 60%, its no wonder why mobile phone manufacturer have been busy trying to woe customers with ad campaigns geared towards improving sales and market share.

 Nigeria is surely not left out of this revolution, for example, Nigeria is the largest market for Blackberry in Africa as we speak and this speaks volumes of our own Smartphone Revolution.
Countries with major installed smartphone bases include China, United States, Germany, Nigeria, India, Brazil and Russia (Courtesy: StrategyAnalytic). The Nigerian market is the tenth largest in the world in terms of mobile subscribers and I can modestly estimate that 1 in every 8 mobile subscribers uses a smartphone in Nigeria, and this would translate to about two (2) million smartphone users. With the introduction of many low price Android phones into the Nigerian market by Huawei, Samsung and others, these numbers can only go higher.
Smartphones have come to stay and are now part of our everyday life and as more people embrace it in Nigeria, a whole lot of opportunities abound.

What are these opportunities?you might ask, I'll be discussing them in the concluding part of this article next week.