HTC Corp (宏達電), the world’s biggest maker of mobile phones using the Android operating system, seized the eighth spot among the world’s mobile phone makers in the second quarter after increasing its shipments by 139 percent year-on-year, according to Gartner Inc’s latest report.
The Stamford, Connecticut-based market researcher said this was the first time that HTC has broken into the top 10 global mobile phone maker list, as Google Inc’s Android platform is increasingly gaining popularity over Apple Inc’s iPhone.
It also reflected the fact that the Taiwanese company is adopting a more aggressive branding strategy this year, compared with the same period last year, Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi said in the report.
Based on Gartner’s statistics, HTC shipped 5.91 million units of mobile phones in the April to June quarter from 2.47 million units a year ago. The company’s market share expanded to 1.8 percent from less than 1 percent over the same period last year, the latest statistics showed.
The top five smartphone makers globally were Nokia, with a 37.4 percent market share, followed by Research In Motion Ltd, Apple, HTC and Motorola Inc, Milanesi said.
Gartner said smartphone sales grew 50.5 percent, more than three times the growth for the market as a whole. The overall mobile phone market increased 13.8 percent to 325.6 million units as prices fell on tougher competition, it said.
Android became the third-biggest smartphone platform with 17.2 percent of the market, after Nokia’s Symbian and RIM’s BlackBerry. Symbian, also used on some phones from other manufacturers, fell almost 10 percentage points to a 41.2 percent market share as Nokia struggled to revamp it and ship new handsets.
“There’s been such huge emphasis on Android, with all the manufacturers backing the platform and the carriers advertising and being a little more generous with subsidies, especially in the US market,” Milanesi said in an interview.
Apple’s iOS dropped behind Android to fourth place among smartphone platforms with a 14.2 percent market share as the iPhone 4 ramped up production. Android surpassed BlackBerry in the US to become the country’s most popular smartphone system, the report said.
Symbian’s slide may have been bigger without the positive response to Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB’s Vivaz line in the second quarter, Milanesi said.
“Even if Nokia had a solid high-end portfolio, you would see some market share loss for Symbian” because of the Android groundswell, she said.
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