Financial, Real Estate, Stock Markets Trends and Current Affairs

Android's market share is growing by nearly 900%, causing competing OSs and associated hardware vendors to experience negative smart phone market share gains. Many believe that Apple is not included in this category. Here I present hard evidence that Android is eating Apples along with everything else.

Continuing my analysis of the high growth smart phone market and putting the finishing touches on the RIMM, GOOG and AAPL models, I had my team perform extensive drill downs of market share and market penetration of the various players involved. As stated in my in my earlier posts, many (if not a majority of) retail investors and surprisingly enough - quite a few professional investors fail to take a purely empirical look at Apple, and instead inject a significant and material amount of passion and subjectivity into their perspectives. It is my opinion that this could potentially set some Apple investors up for an unpleasant surprise.

Below, please find the results of our market share and market penetration drill down for Apple. We have performed identical analysis for Nokia, Research in Motion and HTC. This dynamic model (complete with data populated from Gartnehttp://boombustblog.com/index.php?option=com_wpmuadmin&blog_id=1&task=post.php&action=edit&post=2922&message=1r, Canalyis, Nielson and other sources) provides a very rich, in depth view off the trends in handset sales growth, market share growth, and smart phone market penetration (an aspect I never see discussed on the web) for all of the players mentioned above. It is available for download as an Excel model to BoomBustBlog professional and institutional subscribers, here: Smartphone Market Model - Blog Download Version. Those who wish to subscribe or upgrade their subscription can do so here.

I often scan the comment sections of many blogs and websites to get a feel for the readers' perspective. One premise I see espoused often is that Android is succeeding at the expense of Nokia, RIM and MSFT, and not that of Apple. Both I, and the facts, disagree with this notion. As it stands now, Android is literally eating Apple's smart phone market share, and as of last quarter - which does include a partial month of the big sellers from both the Apple (iPhone 4) and Android (Evo, Samsung Galaxy, Droid X) camps - Apple's phone sales are actually growing slower than the market is expanding. In comparison to the near parabolic growth of the last few years, it is evident that that growth is going somewhere. Where do you think it is going? The potential for lag in phone sales right before a major hardware upgrade should be taken into consideration, for there was probably a lull in Apple phone sales in anticipation of the iPhone 4 release, but the same can be said for the Android handsets as well (all around the month of June).