According to a report published by a company that monitors global sales of mobile terminals, Apple ranked 7th worldwide in terms of mobile terminal sales. Apple keeps the place it held last year, but is closing in on Motorola, which sells fewer and fewer mobile phones year after year. Apple managed to sell 8.743.000 million mobile phones, but the amount is the lowest compared to the 111.5 million mobile phones sold by Nokia in the course of a year. Although the difference is enormous, Apple still had a much higher profit than Nokia, a sign that it is not the quantity that matters but the quality/price of the products sold, and let's not forget that Apple has problems with production, otherwise it would have sold much more.
Apple's sales would have been higher if it had not had to do tight inventory management in preparation for the arrival of the iPhone 4 at the end of the second quarter of 2010. Apple also suffered from some supply constraint on the new device. We expect that a wider global rollout of iPhone 4 will sustain Apple's sales momentum throughout the second half of 2010.
Unfortunately, regarding the operating systems with which the terminals sold in the last year are equipped, iOS has fallen behind Android OS, which has been adopted by more and more smartphone manufacturers, and at the moment Android OS holds 17.2% from the market share vs 14.2% that iOS has. Symbian is still the dominant operating system, but it is rapidly losing market share, as is RIM's operating system. Probably in a few years Android OS will be the operating system used by most mobile terminals.
