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Global cellphone shipments soar

Lower prices for mobile phones and an improved economic outlook sent global cellphone shipments soaring by 20 percent last year, hitting a record-breaking 516.3 million units, a market research study showed on Tuesday.

The previous record of 435 million manufactured handsets was set in 2000, Britain-based research firm Strategy Analytics said in the study.

In 2002 some 429.2 million handsets were shipped.

"Falling wholesale prices, increasing retail handset subsidies, innovation and improving global macro-economic conditions have driven sales growth sharply higher worldwide, particularly in the second half of the year," it noted.

US-based Gartner, another major firm researching international mobile-phone sales, said on Tuesday that according to its preliminary figures the overall mobile cellphone market may have exceeded 510 million units last year.

But Helsinki-based analysts were more cautious.

"These estimates are above the general market view, which is around 500 million, while we believe that about 506 million handsets were sold last year," said Mika Paloranta, telecom analyst with investment bank Carnegie.

Finnish mobile-phone giant Nokia also came up with a lower estimate, of just 471 million handsets.

"These are pretty positive numbers, but somewhat different from ours," Kari Tuutti, spokesman for Nokia mobile phones, said in reaction to the Strategy Analytics and Gartner figures.

The discrepancy was partly explained by the fact that Nokia only counts phones sold to consumers, while researchers give estimates of shipments to wholesalers, he said.

The researchers may also have counted handsets twice if they were made by one manufacturer and then sold by another under the latter's brand name, Tuutti said.

With strong sales in all major regions, global handset wholesale sales grew at an annual rate of 24 percent in the fourth quarter of last year, reaching 158.9 million mobile phones, also a new record, Strategy Analytics noted.

Nokia continued to lead the pack but saw its market share drop by 0.3 percentage points to 34.8 percent last year.

The company made some 179.8 million cellphones in total, up from 150.6 million the previous year, the research firm said.

This was more than twice as much as the No. 2 on the list, US-based Motorola, which produced 75.1 million units last year, up from 70.2 million in 2002, while its part of the overall handset volume dropped from 16.3 to 14.5 percent.

Number three was South Korean company Samsung, which saw its sales increase from 42.2 million to 55.7 million handsets, at the same time boosting its global cellphone market share by a percentage point to 10.8 percent.

German company Siemens increased its part of global sales by 0.2 percentage points to 8.4 percent, at the same time improving sales by 8 million handsets to 43.3 million.

South Korea's LG and Swedish-Japanese Sony-Ericsson were tied for fifth place, each with a market share of 5.3 percent and wholesale sales volumes of 27.5 million and 27.2 million mobile phones, respectively.

As replacement sales are picking up in Europe, where customers have been upgrading their old cellphones with new ones featuring color screens and built-in cameras, the researchers expect a new record for the handset market this year.

"With upgrade rates surging in Western Europe and North America, Strategy Analytics expects full year 2004 selling to grow 13 percent to 585 million units," it said.

Gartner said it believed the handset market would reach 560 million units this year.

New subscribers in Asia, Latin America and eastern Europe, benefiting from falling phone prices, would be another major factor for sales this year, analysts said.
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