The market research firm Kantar has released the latest sales figures for the three months ending January 2016. The latest numbers don’t bring any good news for the folks at Microsoft as their offering continues to decline. Until now, Europe has been a good market for Windows Phone, showing some improvements, but the latest quarter results doesn’t show a good picture — it’s declining even in Europe.
Compared to the same quarter in January 2015, Windows Phone has declined by 3.3 percent in five major European markets, including Italy, Great Britain, Spain, Germany and France. It may be due to the popularity of the Chinese brand Huawei — the company has seen a decent growth in the European market over the past few months, growing to 14 percent share for the January 2016 quarter.
“In the EU5, Huawei remained the second strongest brand in the Android ecosystem, growing to 14% in the three months ending January 2016, up from 5% in the same period in 2014,” said Dominic Sunnebo, business unit director at Kantar Worldpanel ComTech Europe. “In Great Britain and France, Huawei doubled its share over the past year, and climbed to number four in the brand ranking, while remaining number two in Italy, Spain and Germany.”
In the US, the company has a 2.6 percent market share, declining from 4.3 percent in the same quarter last year. Even in China, which is one of the biggest smartphone markets in the world, the Windows Phone just have a meagre 0.9 percent share. It’s possible as China is not only one of the biggest, but one of the most competitive markets as well with a handful of local smartphone brands shipping with Android as its operating system. Overall, Android has seen an increase in their sales figures in almost all major markets including China, US and Europe.
As for Apple, they also have something to be happy about as they are slowly growing in the Chinese market, capturing 25 percent of the smartphone sales in the country.
Microsoft has to seriously consider about doing something to boost the sales of Windows Phone handsets, and it’s not just about launching more and more handsets with the same specifications and slightly different outlook. There are several things which have to be taken care of such as the app gap and the number of key manufacturers opting for the handsets.
You can check out the complete numbers at Kantar’s website.
