Reading Symbian tea leaves

Again for the iPhone paper, I’m trying to better understand the details of 2007 smartphone sales beyond what Canalys provided. This afternoon I tried to figure out Windows Mobile and gave up, because of contradictions between Microsoft’s data and Canalys’ data.

So this evening, I looked at Symbian sales, which Canalys said accounted for 67% of global smartphone sales in 2006 and 67% in 2007. I have friends at Symbian but had no help from them on this endeavor.

Symbian has three user interfaces: S60 (owned by Nokia), UIQ (owned by Sony Ericsson and Motorola) and MOAP (owned by NTT DoCoMo and used only in Japan). All of the UIs are licensed to other vendors, but everyone knows that S60 phones from Nokia are the bulk of Symbian’s revenues.

Canalys provided two hard numbers: Symbian OS is 77M of the 112M smartphones (excludes wireless handhelds) shipped in 2007, and Nokia accounts for 60.5M devices (which is S60 smartphones plus a few Maemo tablets). Beyond that I had to dig.

Symbian issues press releases and quarterly fast facts now and again, so it was pretty easy to estimate the MOAP sales as 14.2M for 2007. There’s no hard numbers for S60, so I used the Nokia sales as a proxy (understating the S60 total), and then assumed the rest was UIQ (perhaps overstating). These are my estimates:

Platform	Q4 Sales	Share	2007 Sales	Share
S60	18.8M	81.5%	60.5M	78.5%
MOAP	3.8M	16.3%	14.2M	18.5%
UIQ	0.5M	2.2%	2.3M	3.0%
Total	23.1M		77.1M

Then I went to the Symbian website and counted the number of current, forthcoming and discontinued phone models by vendor and UI. The Japanese “FOMA” models require a little digging since they are branded by DoCoMo; however, everyone knows who the vendor is because the first letter of the model number gives it away, like “F” for Fujistu.

This is my tally of the models listed by Symbian:

UI	Vendor	Coming	Current	Discontinued	Total
S60	Nokia	5	36	11	52
	Samsung	1	6		7
	LG	1	1		2
	Panasonic		1	1	2
	Lenovo		1		1
	Siemens			1	1
MOAP	Fujitsu		19	8	27
	Mitsubishi		18	1	19
	Sharp		11		11
	Sony Ericsson		8		8
	Motorola		1		1
UIQ	Sony Ericsson		8	2	10
	Motorola/Sendo		3	2	5
	Arima			1	1
	Grand Total	2	77	16	95

In the past year, the main change in vendor participation seems to be the new Motorola UIQ phones after they bought Sendo. It‘s hard to tell how they are doing — or how the Samsung S60 phones are doing.

However, it appears that Sony Ericsson sold about 41 million Walkman phones in 2007 while UIQ phones were at most about 2.3 million. That implies that SE is less committed to Symbian as a multimedia platform than Nokia is — or perhaps SE is mainly targeting low-end MP3 players while Nokia is emphasizing multimedia more.