At the end of January, the market research firm IDC revealed that 1.4 billion smartphones have been shipped in 2015 (up 10.4% over 2014), with Microsoft nowhere to be found in the top five vendors list for 2015. But today, IDC released its latest Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker numbers and the market research company shared this about Windows Phone market share in 2015:
This past year was another challenging year for Windows Phone as shipments were down 18% in 2015 to 11.1 million units with roughly 95% of that volume coming from Microsoft (or Nokia) branded devices. The recent MWC conference in Barcelona showed a few new products from partner OEMs although it remains unclear how serious the Windows Phone offerings will be from OEMs.
These new data seems weird to us as in its last Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker from December 2, IDC forecasted 31.3M Windows phones shipments in 2015. We don’t know how IDC explains this 20.2M shipments difference.
Still, the market research company expects 23.8M Windows phones to be shipped in 2016, with market share falling to 1.6% in 2016 and to an even lower 0.9% in 2020 with 17.8M shipments. IDC also expects the global smartphone market growth to slow down over the next 5 years, with an expected single-digit year-over-year growth throughout the forecast with volumes growing to 1.92 billion in 2020.
While IDC may not always get its forecasts right, we also have yet to see the results of Microsoft’s new mobile strategy with a much smaller Lumia lineup this year, while OEMs such as HP, Acer, Alcatel One Touch and Sony are bringing new Windows 10 Mobile devices to the market this year. Stay tuned for more data about Windows Phone market share, and please tell us in the comments what do you think about the IDC forecasts!
