IDC today was the latest to publish its numbers on smartphone market shares after the major handset makers released Q1 earnings, and like Gartner, Strategy Analytics and the rest, it underscores the power of Google’s Android platform at the moment: Android OEMs shipped 162.1 million handsets in the quarter, giving the platform a 75% share of total worldwide shipments, while Apple’s 37.4 million devices put it at an increasingly distant second position at 17.3%. Microsoft’s Windows Phone, driven primarily by its partner Nokia (79% of all WP shipments), grew the most of all platforms, with a rise of 133.3%, but that still puts it at a single-digit share, 3.2% on 7 million devices shipped.

That meant that Microsoft has now overtaken BlackBerry, which declined by just over 35% with 6.5 million shipments, ending with a 2.9% market share.

Important to note that IDC specifies that this is devices shipped, not sold. Some analysts have told me that the two are effectively interchangeable terms, but shipped is also potentially a more optimistic figure: it points to how well retailers and carriers think certain models are likely to sell in the quarter ahead. Occasionally these can lag compared to how well certain handset makers are actually doing if a device ends up selling worse than expected.

What “shipped” numbers like IDC’s say is that Android and iOS continue to, more or less, remain the only games in town in terms of how confident sales channels feel about shifting devices, with other platforms relegated to niche status. This is something that companies like BlackBerry are trying to change, as evidenced by a recent deal to extend a $256 million loan to Telefonica for purchasing BlackBerry devices.

IDC’s numbers show that together these two platforms accounted for nearly 200 million units (199.5 million) shipped, up 59% over a year ago. The smaller players are not to be dismissed, though. Not only is Windows Phone the most rapidly rising of all platforms at the moment, but IDC notes that BlackBerry’s BB10 new range have hit 1 million shipped devices this quarter.

But turnaround will only come with that kind of growth being sustained. “Given the relatively low volume generated, the Windows Phone camp will need to show further gains to solidify its status as an alterative to Android or iOS,” writes Kevin Restivo, senior research analyst with IDC.

For the time being, the message to users, and to app developers, is that these are the platforms where you want to be. Considering how key content has been as a route to attracting users to these devices, that will continue to pose a challenge for the smaller players.

As with Strategy Analytics’ numbers yesterday detailing the profitability of different smartphone platforms in the quarter, IDC notes that Samsung is by far the “clear leader” in Android. It notes that it had a 41.1% market share. As a sign of the ongoing fragmentation of players on the platform, no other single OEM had more than a single-digit percentage market share after that, “and an even longer list of vendors with market share less than one percent.” The fact that it’s still “free” to license Android, and relatively easy to modify it for a more custom experience, will mean that it will continue to be the platform of choice for OEMs looking for more revenues from the ongoing boom in smartphones.

As we saw in Apple’s earnings earlier in the quarter, the company’s sales of iPhones are at an all-time high, but in comparison to the growth of the rest of the market, it’s actually off, with market share down nearly six percentage points. There is some feeling that part of this is due to the fact that the platform appears stale compared to all the change going on elsewhere with software and hardware features, news handsets and more. “Although demand remains strong worldwide, the iOS experience has remained largely the same since the first iPhone debuted in 2007,” IDC notes, pointing to a “massive overhaul” that appears to be on the cards with iOS 7.

IDC also notes that over the last year, shares of the biggest platforms have fluctuated, although Android’s current 75% is the highest in a year. Against that, the last time that Android approached 75%, in Q3 2012, Apple’s share was only 14.5% as people held out for a new iPhone model. That shows that Apple’s growth this quarter was at the expense of declines for other smaller platforms.

photo: flickr

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Apple continues to lead both as the single-most profitable smartphone maker, and by default the most profitable platform, taking 57% of $12.5 billion in smartphone operating profits in Q1, according to figures out from Strategy Analytics today. Android took 43%, equating to $5.3 billion, Neil Mawston, chief analyst with the firm, tells TechCrunch.

The figures come as analyst houses are releasing various estimates for how smartphones have been selling in Q1. Strategy Analytics have published some numbers that tell the story in a different way.

Yes, Android is dominating smartphone sales (Gartner’s figures yesterday noted that Google’s platform took nearly 75% of all sales in the three month period). Yes, Samsung continues to widen its lead against Apple — now at 31% of all smartphone sales. But it still has a ways to go before it tops Apple, which has built its brand as the premium offering. (One possible reason why it has resisted up to now launching a low-cost, more cheaply made handset.)

Within the Android portion of smartphone profits, Samsung is taking the lion’s share and more. Its $5.1 billion in operating profit works out to 95% of all Android revenues, and 40.8% of all smartphone operating profits overall. Bad news for other vendors/platforms like Nokia and BlackBerry: their collective profits totalled just $300,000 for the quarter, working out to a 2.2% share of profits.

This also shows that Samsung has come quite some way in working out its profitability engine in the last year as it has continued to grow. This time a year ago, it was generating only about half the revenues of Apple in mobile devices (and that was counting Samsung’s smartphones as well as its feature phone handsets), and accordingly a thinner proportion of profits.

These numbers largely tally with some released earlier this month by Canaccord Genuity (via AllThingsD). The difference lies at the lower end, where Canaccord Genuity says that vendors beyond the top two effectively took nothing.

With these numbers coming out just as Google I/O kicks off, Strategy Analytics again throws light on just how disproportionate Samsung’s weight is in the Android ecosystem, and how its sales dominance works out to larger economies of scale and profit: its $5.1 billion in operating profits works out to 95% of all profits made on Android, with LG the only other vendor to break out from “others,” with a meagre 2.5% of profit share on $100,000 in operating profits.

“An efficient supply chain, sleek products and crisp marketing have been among the main drivers of Samsung’s impressive profitability,” Woody Oh, Strategy Analytics’ senior analyst writes. In contrast, “LG delivered a small profit during the quarter, but it currently lacks the volume scale needed to match Samsung’s outsized profits.”

Just think of what that means for the even smaller Android OEMs.

Mawston believes that Samsung is actually generating even more revenue than Google itself from Android, counting things like mobile advertising and apps revenue.

“We believe Samsung generates more revenue and profit from the Android platform than Google does,” he writes. As Google’s Android head Sundar Pichai today reported during that I/O keynote that there have been some 900 million Android activations worldwide, this begs the question of who is in the driver’s seat on the platform — and by association smartphones worldwide.

“Samsung has strong market power and it may use this position to influence the future direction of the Android ecosystem,” Mawston writes. “For example, Samsung could request first or exclusive updates of new software from Android before rival hardware vendors.” If those kinds of requests are likely to get made, it will get harder and harder for Google to resist and continue maintaining the level playing field it’s tried to create for its mobile platform.

Tablets are not included in any of the above calculations, Strategy Analytics says.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Gartner has just released its Q1 figures for mobile handset sales, and the key takeaway is that Android continues to steal the show, led by handset maker Samsung. Google’s mobile platform now accounts for nearly 75% of all handset sales, a jump of almost 20 percentage points on a year ago, and equating to 156 million devices sold in the three-month period. Smartphones sales grew by 63 million units to 210 million for the quarter, making up nearly half of all mobile phone sales overall, at 425 million. With the number of mobile handset sales up by a mere 0.7% on a year ago, it’s clear that higher-end devices are very the much growth engine for the mobile industry at the moment.

Here’s a breakdown of some of the more interesting figures from Gartner.

Although Samsung does not release exact sales figures for its devices, Gartner estimates that the Korean giant is the biggest of them all: it accounted for almost 31% of all smartphones sold in the period, with Apple in number-two with 18%. It’s quite a change from last year, when the two were nearly level, with just 5 percentage points separating them. The widening gap, and Samsung’s growth, will continue into the quarter ahead, it seems, led by the popularity of the company’s newest flagship model. On the other hand, the fact remains that at least some appear to still be holding out for the next iPhone rather than going for the iPhone 5; and Apple meanwhile is still holding back from releasing new, low-cost models that might help it along more in emerging markets and compete more comprehensively against the huge range of Android devices out there.

“We expect the new Galaxy S4 to be very popular despite being more of an evolution than a truly revolutionary device compared to the S3,” writes Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner.

The gap between the two biggest brands and number three continues to be a big one, with Samsung very much taking the lead here. “There are two clear leaders in the OS market and Android’s dominance in the OS market is unshakable,” Anshul writes.

Together, Apple and Samsung accounted for 49 million handset sales. This is down by 1.1 million from a year ago, and as the smartphone market continues to grow, the players who are vying to be the next big challengers continues to churn. LG swapped places with Huawei, and is currently at number-three at 4.8 million units (with a strong showing from some of its newer 4G handsets and its lower-cost smartphone range). Huawei’s 4.4 million, however, shows that it continues to press ahead, as does fellow Chinese handset maker ZTE, which rounds out the top-five:

Samsung, unsurprisingly, is also leading in the overall mobile category, which also counts sales of lower-end feature phones. Its share there is now 23.6%, topping 100 million units.

Just as Samsung is widening the gap against Apple in smartphones, it’s doing the same with Nokia in the overall rankings. The Finnish giant is still number-two but with a 14.8% share, a drop of 5 percentage points on last year.

Looking at mobile platform prominence in smartphones, Android’s current 74.4% market share is nothing short of astounding in terms of its increase, particularly considering that at this point there is no sign of it slowing down.

Gartner’s numbers, it should be noted, are some 10% higher than those from Kantar Worldpanel Comtech that were released at the end of April: a sign of the margin of error between different analysts’ estimates resulting from different counting methods. Here are yet more numbers from IDC, which claims that smartphones outshipped feature phones, and Canalys, which was also more bullish than Gartner on smartphone numbers at a 300 million estimate.

Back to Gartner: the 156 million units sold in the quarter is actually almost double what was sold in the same period a year ago. Android is without a doubt riding the very crest of the smartphone wave: Gartner points out that smartphones accounted for 49.3% of sales of mobile phones worldwide, up from 34.8% in Q1 of 2012, and 44% in the fourth quarter of 2012.

Apple continues to grow but at a slower pace, managing to increase its share by a “mere” 5 million. BlackBerry (still called RIM by Gartner: hello rebranding!) continues to drop, indicating that at least so far, its big BB10 attack has yet to bear significant fruit. Microsoft is showing a respectable doubling of growth to nearly 6 million units, but that is pretty tiny when you look back to Android and its 156 million. It shows that a significant amount of work remains to be done by Microsoft and partners like Nokia if it expects to get anywhere within spitting distance of Android, or even Apple.

Still, the cautionary tale of Symbian remains a sign of how fast a handset maker can fall from grace. It’s now at 0.3 percent of sales now that Nokia has discontinued its production of the once market-leading devices — although its share was falling fast even before that.

Gartner points out that Asia is currently the market driver for mobile phone sales worldwide, accounting for more than half of all sales, with China remaining the biggest single market.

“More than 226 million mobile phones were sold to end users in Asia/Pacific in the first quarter of 2013, which helped the region increase its share of global mobile phones to 53.1 per cent year-on-year,” writes Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner. “In addition, China saw its mobile phone sales increase 7.5% in the first quarter of 2013, and its sales represented 25.7 per cent of global mobile phone sales, up nearly 2 percentage points year-on-year.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

AOL (owner of TechCrunch) has just reported its Q1 results for the quarter, and it’s a mixed bag, with sales of $539 million, up 2%, beating Wall Street estimates, but with diluted earnings per share coming in at $0.32. Analysts were expecting EPS of $0.35 on revenues of $537.15 million. Still, Q1′s EPS number is up 45% on the same period a year ago.

Here’s how revenues and profit break down over the last several quarters:

This quarter, it looks like AOL’s global display revenues are finally in an upswing, rising 8% over a year ago to $140 million. Subscription revenues, the legacy part of AOL’s business that still includes (yes) revenues from dial-up customers, is still coming in as a bigger part of AOL’s revenues, at $165.8 million. They are slowly on the decline, though, down 9% on a year ago.

Last quarter was a notable one for AOL in that it was the first one in eight years where the company had posted revenue growth, with revenues of $600 million for the three-month period. As with many other online, advertising-based companies, AOL’s revenues for this most recent, post-holiday quarter will be seasonally lower.

More interestingly, the company has been working to reposition itself around a couple of key strengths where it can still gain ground, even as Google continues to dominate the online advertising market overall.

The first of these involves innovations around ad tech. That has included grouping together all of the company’s online advertising sales and technology assets into a single group, AOL Networks. And last week the strategy got another boost when AOL signed a deal with FreeWheel and Mediaocean so that AOL’s online inventory, and specifically its video inventory, can be bundled together with TV ad buys in a multiscreen strategy.

The second is a stronger emphasis on rich-media advertising, specifically against premium content that AOL owns itself or has deals to provide advertising for. AOL’s portfolio got a boost early in the quarter with the acquisition of gdgt, started by two former Engadgeteers (founder Peter Rojas and ex-editor-in-chief Ryan Block).

And last week, AOL expanded the amount of content against which it can sell online ads even further with the news that it would be releasing 15 new original video programs, created in a factual, unscripted format that fits with the rest of AOL’s newsy portfolio. However, as it grows in these areas, it’s also continuing to whittle down assets in others, such as its nearly-concurrent decision to shut down AOL Music.

AOL’s own branded content is still lagging behind the company’s subscription revenues (again, these relate mainly to the company’s legacy services) but they are also showing the strongest growth in terms of revenues over a year ago. But if you look at operating income before depreciation and amortization, collectively the Brand Group, along with AOL Networks, are still loss-making, if coming very close to break-even:

The third-party advertising business continues to grow for AOL. This quarter revenues for ads distributed on sites not owned by AOL were up 10% to $120.7 million.

More to come.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It’s no secret that the amount of time that tech companies are spending in Washington, D.C., is at a high. And money spent on lobbying has also been reaching peaks for a number of well-known technology giants, including Facebook. In the first quarter of 2013, Facebook spent $2.45 million on lobbying efforts, a 277 percent increase from $650,000 a year earlier. In the fourth quarter of 2012, Facebook spent $1.4 million on lobbying, so this is a big jump both on a quarterly and yearly basis.

So what did Facebook spend on this quarter? International regulation of the Internet and freedom of expression; privacy and security policies and the education of these policies; education of online advertising; immigration reform; cyber security and data security; and discussions on tax issues and stock options.

It’s also worth noting that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and a number of other tech all-stars recently co-founded a political advocacy and lobbying group designed to promote policies that will keep the American workforce competitive. The first item on the agenda for the group is pushing comprehensive immigration reform, but it will also be focusing its efforts on education reform and scientific research.

After hitting highs in lobbying spending in 2012, Google cut its first-quarter lobbying spending by 33 percent to $3.35 million year-over-year (Google spent $5.03 million on lobbying in the first quarter of 2012). The search giant’s spending was flat from quarter to quarter, with Google spending the exact same amount on lobbying in Q4 of 2012. Google scored a huge victory in February when the Federal Trade Commission closed its antitrust investigation, and many say that Google escaped lightly because of its increased presence and lobbying in D.C.

This quarter, Google spent money lobbying on issues of regulation of online advertising, patent reform and intellectual property enforcement; privacy and data security issues; renewable energy policy; online freedom of expression; health information technology and privacy; cyber security; immigration and job creation; openness and competition in online services, math, science and technology education; international tax reform; the benefits of cloud computing for small businesses; broadband adoption and open Internet access; and freedom of expression and intellectual property in international trade agreements.

And it looks like Facebook’s not the only company taking a page out of the Google lobbying playbook. According to Consumer Watchdog.org, a number of other tech giants also increased spending on lobbying efforts. Microsoft spent $2.53 million in the quarter, which is a 41 percent increase from $1.79 million in 2012. Amazon spent $859,831, a 32 percent increase from $650,000 in 2012. Apple spent $720,000, a 44 percent increase from $500,000 in 2012. Oracle spent $1.37 million, a 25 percent increase from 1.1 million in 2012.

Photo Credit: Flickr/Cliff1066.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook has shared user growth statistics for the first quarter of the 2013 fiscal year during the company’s earnings call today. The social network reported continuing growth, reaching 1.11 billion monthly active users for the quarter. It also reported 751 million mobile monthly active users, a continued increase from 680 million last quarter and 604 million the quarter before.

The graph below shows Facebook’s global growth for the last nine quarters. Though growth has slowed in countries such as the US and Canada as well as Europe, the company has grown by 54 million monthly active users, a 23.2 percent increase from Q1 2012.

For daily active users, Facebook has grown to 665 million, a 47 million user increase. Last quarter was the first time Mobile DAUs surpassed web DAUs and this continued into this quarter as well. With the introduction of Facebook Home and updated applications, much of the 665 million daily active users are connecting with the social network through mobile devices.

Facebook also reported 751 million mobile active users, an increase of 71 million. It also reported that 189 million are mobile only active users, a 42 million increase quarter-to-quarter. More users than ever are only using their mobile devices to connect to the social network as apparent by the 124 percent increase from Q1 2012.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Yelp, the local online business and restaurant guide that first launched in the U.S. in 2004 and now lives in 21 countries and 12 languages, and has more than 100 million monthly unique visitors as of January this year, launched in New Zealand this morning. On the heels of bringing its review data to Kiwis and continuing its international expansion, Yelp announced its first quarter earnings at market close today.

In the fourth quarter, Yelp missed earnings expectations, with net revenue coming in at $41.2 million in Q4 of 2012, a 65 percent growth in new revenue from 2011, while it saw a net loss of $5.3 million, or $0.08 per share. Today, Yelp turned things around, as it announced net revenue jumped to $46.1 million in Q1, reflecting a 68 percent growth from Q1 2012, while cumulative reviews grew 42 percent year-over-year to more than 39 million, average unique visitors grew 43 percent y/y and local business accounts grew 63 percent.

Wall Street’s consensus estimates were that Yelp would see $44.5 million in revenue for the quarter, and $1.5 million EBITDA. Yelp hurdled over the bar, in fact, seeing a net loss in the first quarter of 2013 of $4.8 million, or $0.08 per share. This means that while net losses only fell slightly from Q4 2012, it saw a more significant reduction in losses year-over year, $9.8 million, or $0.31 per share, over the first quarter of 2012.

In addition, compared to Wall Street estimates, Yelp said that adjusted EBITDA for the first quarter of 2013 was $3.2 million, in comparison with an adjusted EBITDA loss of approximately $1 million for the first quarter of 2012.

In the quarterly earnings release today, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman trumped up Yelp’s milestones in the last quarter, namely its hitting a record 102 million unique users over the last quarter, while touching on its plans to improve on its mobile experience. Something that should be music to the ears of anyone with a smartphone.

“We had a great start to the year and are excited about the large opportunity in front of us,” Stoppelman said. “This quarter we achieved many milestones including a record 102 million unique visitors on a monthly average basis, demonstrating the strength of our content and the trust we have earned from consumers. We provide valuable leads to local businesses because consumers turn to Yelp at the critical point when they are making purchase decisions. Looking to the rest of the year, we will continue to focus our product innovation around the mobile experience and new features to better serve the consumer and local business owners, and we will continue integrating Qype into the Yelp platform.”

Other business highlights?

Yelp mobile saw 36 percent of local ads shown on mobile devices in the first quarter, while the app was used on 10 million unique devices over the quarter, building on the company’s launch of display ads on mobile for the first time in Q1.

In terms of guidance, Yelp expects revenue in the second quarter of 2013 to be in the range of $52.5 million to $53.5 million, which would represent a growth of around 62 percent compared to the second quarter 2012. Adjusted EBITDA is forecasted to fall in the range of $4.5 million to $5 million. For the full year 2013, net revenue is expected to be in between $216 million and $218 million, representing a 58 percent growth year-over-year.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook has just posted its earnings for the quarter that ended March 31, 2013. Facebook hit $1.46 billion in revenue up 38% from Q1 2012, beating Wall Street estimates of sales of $1.44 billion. Facebook reported earnings of $1.06 billion for the same quarter a year ago. Earnings per shared missed estimates, staying flat at $0.12 (analysts had expected earnings per share of $0.13.

Net income was up 7% to $219 million, versus $205 million a year ago (GAAP figures).

While revenue only grew slightly, the amount of its 1.11 billion monthly users that returned daily, 665 million, was slightly better than last quarter. For more details on user growth, read our post by Drew Olanoff.

Facebook also noted in an SEC filing issued today that Chief Accounting Officer David Spillane is leaving the company. Spillane had been the company’s revenue controller since 2008, overseeing growth and IPO. He is getting replaced by Jas Athwal effective May 10.

Initial reactions from the stock market were mildly positive, with the Facebook’s share price increasing slightly in after-hours trading just after the earnings were released, though the price had fallen 1.22% and closed at $27.43.

The percentage of Facebook’s total ad revenue that came from mobile surged to 30%, up from 23% last quarter. Read more on Facebook’s mobile progress from Kim-Mai Cutler.

Last quarter, Facebook posted earnings of $1.59 billion, a rise of 40% year-over-year. Last quarter the company had 1.1 billion monthly users, 618 million daily users, and 680 mobile monthly million, up 57% year-over-year.

In the lead-up to today’s earnings, there were a lot of expectations about how Facebook would perform performing around some key metrics.

User numbers. As noted in the WSJ, one area where Facebook will be scrutinized will be in its proportion of daily to monthly active users. In Q4 the figure was 58.5% globally. Mark Mahaney of RBC Capital Markets told the newspaper that he expects that to go up to 59% but “anything less than 58% would be a negative for Facebook.” Elsewhere, there have been some reports of user attrition. However, Facebook hit a 60% daily to monthly users, showing slightly better engagement.

The fact that Facebook saw a higher DAU/MAU ratio means that Facebook was more engaging this quarter than last, a strong sign rebuking critics who claim people are using the site less. However, Facebook’s user growth is currently coming predominantly from developing markets that don’t earn it nearly as much money as users in first-world markets like the United States.

Advertising and payments. Last quarter Facebook’s ad revenue was $1.33 billion, up 41% on the year before, and payments revenue came in at $256 million. Facebook’s payments revenue in Q1 fell to $213 million, indicating a shift of game developers and users to mobile where Facebook doesn’t earn the 30% cut it’s used to on the web.

Mobile. Last quarter mobile revenues revenues grew to make up 23 percent of the company’s total sales. Mobile revenues effectively equals mobile advertising, since gifts, also sold on mobile, are negligible. Next quarter, however, Facebook will start making another revenue stream in mobile by way of Parse, the mobile development platform. Parse has around 60,000 developers, and offers a freemium model based on usage, with the cheapest paid version priced at around $199 per month. This was still a relatively small business when it was acquired last month for a price believed to be around $85 million so it’s not likely to grow and become a significant revenue source for another couple of years. Another specific area proving to be a significant driver within Facebook’s mobile ads business are app install ads, where app publishers pay a fee for an add to appear in a person’s mobile news feed.

Facebook Home; Graph Search. This past quarter saw the launch of two major initiatives for the company, Facebook Home on mobile and Graph Search, the “third pillar” after News Feed and Timeline, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook Home saw a little surge of interest with 500,000 downloads in its first five days across a limited amount of devices that currently support it.

The earnings call is at 2pm PT; we’ll be listening in and reporting on that.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Online real estate company Trulia just released its earnings for the first quarter of 2013, reporting that its revenue grew 97 percent year-over-year to $24 million.

Despite the growth, the company still posted a net loss of $2 million. On a non-GAAP basis, it lost 2 cents per share. Analysts had predicted a loss of 1 cent per share with revenue of $21.08 million.

Total traffic has grown too, from 20.6 million unique monthly visitors during this period last year to 31.4 million this year. And it had 11.4 million uniques on mobile. (Trulia has changed the way that it counts mobile traffic, so we can’t offer an apples-to-apples comparison — previously it was just usage of downloaded apps, but now it also includes traffic to the Trulia website from tablets and other devices.) And the number of subscribers has grown 42 percent year-over-year, to 27,920.

In the earnings press release, CEO Pete Flint said:

Trulia achieved an excellent start to 2013. We achieved another quarter of record revenue, driven by strong execution in both our Marketplace and Media businesses. Trulia’s mobile traffic continues to expand at a rapid rate, while our subscriber base grew by approximately 3,500 during the quarter.

In the past quarter, Trulia also launched a new recommendation engine called Trulia Suggest. Since the launch, Trulia says users have performed 2 million “likes” or “hides” on properties in the company database.

As of 4:45pm Eastern, Trulia is up 6.68 percent in after-hours trading.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Don’t write off Microsoft’s chances in mobile just yet. It may still be struggling to make itself count in the smartphone space but early signs are more promising for Windows plus tablets. Microsoft has gone from having no share of the global tablet OS market in Q1 last year to taking 7.4% one year later, with three million Windows 8 tablets shipped in Q1 2013, according to preliminary figures from Strategy Analytics‘ Global Tablet OS Market Share: Q1 2013 report.

The analyst notes record tablet shipments in the quarter, with global branded tablet shipments reaching an “all-time high” of 40.6 million units in Q1, driven on by year-on-year growth of 117% (vs 146% in Q1 2012).

Microsoft launched Windows 8, its touchscreen-friendly reboot of its desktop OS, last fall – so it’s swung from zero to a 7.4% share in just under half a year. Compare that to the Windows Phone OS, which launched more than two years ago, in fall 2010: Windows Phone took only a 4.1% share in the US smartphone OS market in the three months ending February, according to Kantar figures. Globally, its share is even smaller. Earlier this year ABI Research predicted Windows Phone will end 2013 with around 3% of the worldwide market.

Returning to tablets, compared to the dominant players in the tablet OS market — iOS and Android — Microsoft’s share is still very modest. Strategy Analytics dubs it a “niche” portion, noting that “very limited distribution, a shortage of top tier apps, and confusion in the market, are all holding back shipments”. Microsoft has followed its Windows Phone strategy of paying developers to create apps for Windows 8 but it’s still got work to do in the quality vs quantity stakes. While “confusion in the market” likely refers to Microsoft’s decision to offer two flavours of tablet OS (Windows RT/Windows 8).

According to Strategy Analytics’ figures, Apple retains its lead in the tablet OS space, with a 48.2% share in Q1 vs a “robust” 43.4% for Android on 19.5 million and 17.6 million unit shipments respectively. Apple’s tablet lead over Android is shrinking considerably, dropping to under half the market from 63.1% in the year ago quarter when Android took just over a third (34.2%).

The analyst described Apple’s performance as “solid”, helped by its first full quarter with the iPad mini in its tablet portfolio. But Android is growing fastest, with global branded Android tablet shipments increasing 177% annually in the quarter. Add in budget white box tablets and Android becomes the market leader, taking a 52% share of the total tablet market while iOS slips to 41%.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch