W. European Q2 2013 mobile phone shipments reach 43.3 million units with 2.6% Y-o-Y growth, but Q-o-Q declines take place IDC reports, as customers prefer to restrain their spending in the wait for newly announced device launches.
The feature phone segment continues to shrink (-27% Y-o-Y to 10.7m units) while smartphones make 75% of the overall W. European market with shipments reaching 32.6m units with Y-o-Y growth.
"The W. European market continues to suffer from a tough economic environment, although this does not prevent mobile operators from pushing those handsets that will potentially drive higher revenues in the future," IDC says. "One important fact worth noting this quarter was that LTE already represented 32% of total mobile phone shipments and 43% of total smartphone shipments... [I]t is important for mobile operators to enable their users with LTE handsets while the expansion of their LTE networks continues. When the networks are widely available geographically it will be faster to migrate users to an LTE data plan as they become cheaper."
Android remains top OS with Q2 2013 market share reaching 71% and shipments growing by 29% Y-o-Y to 23.2m units, the highest in the region yet according to the analyst. IDC blames the loss of iOS share (from 19.4% on Q2 2012 to 17.4%) to expectation for the latest iPhone models, and also expects Windows Phone to continue seeing tortoise-style "study but slow" growth.
When it comes to vendors, Samsung continues to dominate the W. European smartphone market, just like it does everywhere else, with 42.9% Q2 2013 market share. Apple follows with 17.5% share (down from 19% in Q2 2012), together with Sony (11.3%), LG (8%) and Nokia (5.5%).
