So what if iPhone marketshare is tiny?

Even though it was a huge year for the iPhone and thus for Apple mobile phones sales, the share of the overall market that is represented by the iPhone is very small, indeed. But what does that mean?

The Gartner Group released its report covering the shipment of mobile phones during the the fourth quarter of 2008, and including the entire year 2008. For that final quarter of the year, Apple shipped 1.3 percent of all phones worldwide. For the full 2008 annual period, they shipped only 0.9 percent. Those numbers, of course, do not sound very impressive.

However, one must stop to think that all worldwide cell phone manufacturers combined shipped 1.22 billion mobile telephones in 2008, according to an Apple Watch article. They shipped 314.7 million in the fourth quarter alone, and that was in a badly declining world economy. No matter how you look at it, that is a lot of cell phones. Even at that, Carolina Milanesi, research director for mobile devices at Gartner, said “Mobile devices in both emerging and developed markets experienced the lowest quarter-on-quarter growth (2 percent) ever recorded in a fourth quarter.”

Milanesi continued, “Efforts to reduce inventory will intensify in the first quarter of 2009 and continue into the second quarter of 2009. In the second half of 2009, the channel will have to start restocking and this will help sell-in volumes. This will not mark the start of a market recovery—we do not expect demand to stabilize before 2010.” That is to say, shipments of mobile phones overall will be flat or down slightly.

Still, Apple sold way over one million telephones in 2008. That is not bad for a company that had never sold any cell phones at all until the middle of 2007. Further, the iPhone is not just a cellular phone. It is a smartphone, a special breed within the mobile category, and part of a niche market within the broader category, one which expects far fewer sales than the barebones phones at the top of the sales charts, such as the low-cost models sold in great quantity by makers such as Nokia, Samsung, and Mototola.

In the end, the watchers of the marketplace will need to begin comparing apples with apples. In this case, that means comparing Apple iPhone sales to comparable phones, of which there are very few, or at least to other smartphones. It really does not impart much information about the vehicle itself to simply give the number of Rolls Royce automobiles sold as a percentage of worldwide auto sales.

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