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Cellphone sales up 14% on demand for latest models

Worldwide mobile-phone sales rose 14 percent in the fourth quarter, helped by a surge in demand for models with new features such as color screens, Gartner Inc's Dataquest market-research unit said.

Global handsets sales rose to 122.6 million units in the three months ended Dec. 31, Dataquest said in a press release. For all of 2002, sales rose 6 percent to 423.4 million units compared with the previous year, it said.

Mobile-phone operators such as Vodafone Group Plc, the world's largest cellphone company, and Japan's NTT DoCoMo Inc have promoted phones with features such as cameras and location services to revive sales after the global handset market shrank in 2001 for the first time in history. While operators are counting on the handsets to entice users to spend more per month, analysts and investors are more cautious about the outlook.

"The industry consensus was around 400 million units for the full year, so it's good news," Hitoshi Kuriyama, an analyst at Merrill Lynch Japan Securities, said of sales last year. Still, "I don't hear anyone being optimistic about 2003."

Four of the five top mobile-phone sellers gained market share last year compared with 2001, with Samsung Electronics Co posting the biggest gain, Dataquest said.

"Consumers embraced a variety of innovative handsets, especially those with color screens, rather than delaying replacement purchases because of an ongoing lack of compelling mobile data services," Bryan Prohm, a senior analyst at Gartner Dataquest, said in the release.

Nokia Oyj, which retained the No. 1 spot with a 35.8 percent share of the market, sold 151 million units last year. Motorola Inc was the world's second-largest mobile-phone maker with a 15.3 percent share, up from 14.8 percent in 2001.

Samsung's share leaped to 9.8 percent from 7.1 percent, Dataquest said. Siemens AG took 8.2 percent of the market, up from 7.4 percent.

Of the top five, Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications Ltd was the sole loser of market share. Sony Ericsson's stake fell from 6.7 percent in 2001 to 5.5 percent last year, Dataquest said.

The debut of phones with Internet links and built-in digital cameras may help lift sales again this year, the researcher said.
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