With less than 5 percent of the overall handset market share, Apple has managed to claim 50 percent of the industry profit, one analyst writes Tuesday. Additionally, the Cupertino, Calif. company did it with a handset less than five years old, stealing market share from two cell phone veterans – Nokia and RIM.
“We anticipate Apple will continue to gain share from Nokia and RIM during their smartphone transitions,” Canaccord Genuity analyst T. Michael Walkley told investors. He believes RIM will lose market share for the “next several years”, while Nokia likely will shed handset share “over the next several quarters.”
Both companies are in transition as the handset industry retools to take on the iPhone juggernaut. While RIM has put its bet on the QNX operating system, leaving analysts skeptical following the company reducing revenue forecasts, cell phone giant Nokia dropped its Symbian mobile operating system in favor of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
