A recent newspaper article on 'what men should know about dating' contained the advice:
"Switch off your mobile phone when you're on a first date."
That rather goes to show the extent to which mobile technology has changed our lives, and not always for the better! Mobile telephony has been a growth area for the past twenty years. However, that hasn't always made money for investors - Vodafone (LON:VOD) for instance saw its share price get stuck for years in a 120-140p trading range, and has become a yield stock despite having exposure to some strong growth markets.
Nowadays, while voice traffic is seeing prices and profitability driven down, data usage is growing strongly and producing good profits for mobile networks. That's also been good news for handset manufacturers, who got a double whammy - global demand for mobile phones growing fast as new users joined networks in emerging markets, plus demand for higher specification phones as data usage became more important. (Those are not mutually exclusive trends either; India is seeing huge demand for web-capable phones, leapfrogging the stage of 'broadband in the home' to go directly to mobile broadband.). However, a spanner has now been thrown into the works. Google's open source Android operating system has been winning market share on mobile devices - growing from nothing in 2007 to 32% of the market now according to IDC. Even if Apple's new iPhone manages to grab back a few percent, it'll still be number two to Android. By 2015, Android is expected to have 40% of the market according to US broker Piper Jaffray's analyst.
Android has won share from both Microsoft and Nokia, as well as Apple. Nokia is looking particularly hurt - recently, it hit the news as CEO Stephen Elop issued a memo with the following stern words:
"We poured gasoline on our own burning platform. I believe we have lacked accountability and leadership to align and direct the company through these disruptive times. We had a series of misses. We haven't been delivering innovation fast enough. We're not collaborating internally. Nokia, our platform is burning."
(The whole memo is on the web at engadget).
Nokia shares have really suffered.It's moving its phones to Windows 7, in a dramatic break with the past. And it seems to be stuck at the lower end of…
