Thread, More news on QCOM. In this case data on handset sales and marketshare from WSJ. Use this link if you are a subscriber.
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The leading seller of phones over the quarter was Nokia Corp. of Finland, according to the report from Dataquest Inc. of San Jose, Calif. Nokia had a 32% market share of the seven million handsets sold over the quarter. Qualcomm Inc., San Diego, was second, with a 15% market share, followed by Telefon AB L.M. Ericsson of Sweden with a 13% share, and Motorola Inc., Schaumburg, Ill., with a 12% share.
Dataquest didn't have year-earlier sales figures but noted that 17.9 million digital handsets were sold in all of 1998. First-quarter sales of wireless phones are usually among the year's weakest, indicating overall figures for 1999 will be huge.
"The U.S. is the world's biggest market for wireless phones, and it's really hot," said Matt Hoffman, who wrote the report. "The market could be up 125% this year."
Nokia's numbers were down about two percentage points from its share for all of 1998, while Qualcomm's were up by about the same amount. Ericsson suffered a big loss, down about 6 1/2 percentage points.
Ericsson's declining share is likely due to the growing influence of a digital standard called code-division multiple access, or CDMA, which Dataquest said is now the most popular of the three main digital standards used in the U.S. Ericsson doesn't make a CDMA phone. Qualcomm, with a growing share, makes only CDMA equipment.
Other major makers supply phones for CDMA and the other two standards, time-division multiple access, or TDMA, and global standard for mobile communications, or GSM.
Ericsson officials said the numbers were in line with its own figures. "In general, their figures are correct," said Hakan Wretsel, Ericsson's vice president for mobile phones for the Americas. He said, however, that his company had recently come through a series of manufacturing problems that affected first-quarter sales.
Mr. Wretsel also said that Ericsson has been concentrating on sales in the rapidly growing markets of South America. "In the second quarter, we shipped 1.2 million phones to South America, compared to 500,000 phones in the first quarter," he said.
Ericsson, which last winter resolved a longstanding intellectual-property dispute with Qualcomm, also is working on a CDMA phone but may be running into problems. Just a month ago, senior company officials said their CDMA phone would be ready in early 2000, but Mr. Wretsel said he expected it "in the summertime next year."
Sounds like good news for QCOM
Best Regards,
Tom
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