Symbian shipments up 53 per cent

Symbian CEO Nigel Clifford was in a cheery mood on Monday as he reported year on year shipment growth of 53 per cent for the fourth quarter of last year, with 22.4 million units shipped in the last three months of 2007 - which as Clifford was happy to point out, equates to three phones every second.

Revenues at the OS outfit were up 18 per cent at £56.5m.

The number of Symbian licensees dropped by one during 2007 to eight, although the organisation's vendor partners account for 90 per cent of the handset market, according to Clifford.

While Nokia is the clear leader in the Symbian sphere, reflecting the Finnish vendor's dominance in the global handset market, Clifford said that the overall terminal vendor rankings are not reflected by Symbian shipment figures.

"After Nokia, it's a bit less clear," Clifford told telecoms.com. "We have Japanese vendors like Sharp that are very big in Japan but not so large globally."

As feature phones come down in price, the Symbian OS portfolio is finding its way into a  greater range of handsets - it's no longer restricted to the 'Smartphone' market. Whether or not the Symbian market share will become increasingly reflected in the global figures as more and more handsets are Symbian-enabled remains to be seen.

One theme emerging at the show this year is the various ways in which the telecoms community will react to and accommodate the mobile march of large internet and IT players. And with Apple's iPhone and Google's Android platform grabbing headlines, Symbian's response could be a useful indicator.

"We anticipated this happening," said Clifford. "It's one of the reasons we have a partner programme that includes Google and Yahoo, who are both really good partners. They've developed some great applications."

But Symbian partnership is not enough to satisfy the likes of Google. So why does the internet giant feel the need to work outside of the Symbian circle? "We may even have said that to them, you never know." Clifford said. "Maybe Google wanted to do something at the lower end, because we've satisfied the market at the top end."

Clifford continued: "The unknown about a number of the new entrants is how their business model is going to work.  How cooperative, competitive or challenging is it going to be to the established business models of the operators and the vendors?"

Which is probably a question that many people at the show are pondering.

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