Mobile phone sales fell by 8.6% to 269.1 million units in the first quarter of 2009, according to Gartner, but smartphone sales grew by 12.7% to 36.4 million units.
This was "the biggest quarter-on-quarter contraction since Gartner began monitoring the market on a quarterly basis in 2001," said Carolina Milanesi, research director for mobile devices at Gartner, based in Egham in the UK.
Nokia continued to dominate the handset business with a 36.2% market share. However, it lost 3 percentage points on sales that slipped from 115.2m to 97.4m units for the quarter, compared with last year. Nokia was followed by Samsung (51.4m units), LG (26.5m), Motorola (16.6m) and Sony Ericsson (14.5m).
Nokia was also dominant in smartphones, selling 15.0 million units for a market share of 41.2%. However, it lost 4 percentage points as sales increased only slightly from 14.6m units in the same quarter last year.
Nokia was followed by Research in Motion (7.2m units), Apple (3.9m), HTC (2.0m) and Fujitsu (1.4m). Apple's market share more than doubled, from 5.3% to 10.8%, gaining 5.5 percentage points. RIM gained 6.6 percentage points. The number for HTC is only for HTC-branded devices.
Smartphone sales represented 13.5% of all mobile device sales, up from 11% in the first quarter of last year.
Apple's smartphone sales gave it 1.5% of the total mobile phone market.
Gartner said: "Symbian accounted for 49.3% of worldwide smartphone operating systems (OS) market share in the first quarter of 2009, down from 56.9% share in the first quarter of 2008. RIM's smartphone OS market share reached 19.9% in the first quarter of 2009, up from 13.3% share in the first quarter of last year. The iPhone OS accounted for 10.8% of the market, up from 5.3% market share in the first quarter of 2008."
