"Its market share declined 5.5 percentage points year-on-year, and its share has reached its lowest since 1997," Gartner said in a study.
Nokia had released its own figures on April 21 putting first-quarter market share at 29%, down from 33% in the first quarter of 2010. Earlier this year, the company announced a radical restructuring to overcome increasingly fierce competition in the smartphone market.
The Finnish company, which had a global market share of 40% as late as 2008, nonetheless remains the mobile industry leader. It ranks well ahead of second-place Samsung, which holds 16%, followed by LG in third with 5.6%, Apple in fourth with 3.9% and RIM with 3.0%.
Nokia announced in February that it expected a "period of uncertainty" as it phased out its Symbian platform in favour of a tie-in with Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system for its smartphones. But Gartner said the Finnish company was still taking a beating in the rapidly growing smartphone sector, pointing out that "Android and Apple's iOS continued to dominate the smartphone operating system wars."
"Smartphones accounted for 23.6% of overall sales in the first quarter of 2011, an increase of 85% year-on-year," Roberta Cozza, Gartner's principal research analyst, said in the report.
Worldwide mobile phone devices sales meanwhile increased by 19% year-on-year, according to Gartner's data, totalling 427.8 million units sold in the first quarter. The research group said it expected the total number of mobile phone sold worldwide this year to tick in at nearly 1.8 billion units.
Source: AFP
