Telecom Lead India: Global annual mobile phone shipments will grow at a CAGR of 5.5 percent between 2011
and 2017, reaching 2.2 billion units.

Ovum predicts that smartphones will surpass the overall
market for mobile phones, growing at a CAGR of 21.0 percent between 2011 and
2017 to reach 1.7 billion units. This will account for 77 percent of the
overall mobile phone market globally in 2017.

Ovum says that feature phones will continue to play a small
role in emerging markets in 2017. Meanwhile, feature phone shipments will
plunge to 0.5 billion by 2017.

The market analysis firm says that the primary growth driver
will be demand from emerging markets, where connection growth will continue to
fuel handset shipments.

The secondary growth driver will be the migration from
narrowband networks such as  GPRS, EDGE, GSM, and CDMA2000 1xRTT to mobile
broadband networks like WCDMA, HSPA, LTE, TD-SCDMA, CDMA2000 EV-DO, and Mobile
WiMAX.

The firm suggests that the migration will have an impact in
all geographic regions. The migration will be aided by the increasing adoption
of smartphones and it will happen at a faster rate in mature markets.

According to Ovum, Android will dominate the smartphone
market over the next five years. Smartphones based on Android accounted for 44
percent of the smartphone market in 2011, which was an increase from 17 percent
in 2010.

Ovum estimates that Android-based smartphones will grow at a
CAGR of 22.6 percent over the forecast period, and will account for 48 percent
of the smartphone market in 2017.

The growth of Android-based samrtphones will be driven by
the large number of handset vendors using Android as their primary smartphone
platform.

Apple’s iOS will be the second most widely deployed software
platform in 2017, accounting for 27 percent of the smartphone market. This is
an increase over the 23 percent share of the market it reported in 2011.

Despite its slow start, Ovum predicts that Microsoft will
have established Windows Phone as a relevant smartphone platform by 2017.

The Windows Phone platform, with the assistance of Nokia,
will account for 13 percent of the smartphone market in 2017. Despite losing
significant market share since its high point in 2009, RIM’s BlackBerry
platform will still represent 10 percent of the market in 2017.

Low-cost smartphones to grow to 45 million units in 2012

According to ABI Research, low-cost OEMs that are shifting
to smartphones, such as Huawei and ZTE, will be a key driving factor for the
growth and innovation in the sub-$150 smartphone segment. Low-cost smartphones
will grow from 45 million shipments in 2012 to 170 million in 2016.

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