News

According to a recent study, in four years 30% of all handsets shipped will be smartphones; that is 452 million smartphones in 2012. We're already seeing this trend on the gsmExchange trading floor. Check out "What's Hot" and you'll see some of the most popular phones are now smartphones. A few market trends are contributing to the surge in the smartphone market.

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This year's financial slowdown has a lot of people worried, but many analysts predict that telecom will hold up better than other industries. In the past few months we've seen increasing evidence of the recession affecting the mobile phone industry, as well. There will be, of course, some companies that will fare better than others, and there's still some good news amongst the bad. Here are some highlights we've pulled from recent news and trends.

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Two major manufacturers revealed their third quarter results last week: Sony Ericsson suffered a 10% drop in sales, experienced a loss of € 25 Million, but retained its market share of 8%, albeit at the expense of gross margin, as prices were slashed across the board.

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October this year will bring the release of Android - Google's first open source mobile platform.

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Many of our members - especially the ones active in the Indian, Middle East, and African markets are beginning to distribute low cost Chinese Manufactured handsets. We think that there is a good business case here as on the one hand the end user is getting a lot more features for his money, and on the other hand, the sales margin is somewhat higher than handsets from the tier 1 manufacturers. Obviously, great care needs to be taken in selecting the supplier, in order to ensure that the quality, reliability as well as all the certifications correspond to expectations. This is another story.. but more on that at a later time.

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Or so it seems, given the code names that Motorola is baptizing its latest newborn. After Alexander, details of which has been leaked last week, the Motorola Atila is a Windows-Mobile based handset that like the iPhone has no keyboard.

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Market Research firm Gartner has released some figures for the mobile handset market place. It is forecasting 1.28 billion units to hit the market in 2008; a growth of 11% relative to the 1.15 billion units sold last year. A For the first half of 2008, c. 600 Million handsets have hit the market. We are however set to see a moderate improvement for the second half of the year, and this will very much depend on the last quarter where seasonality and new product introductions are a sales booster.

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It is one of the most traded phones on our exchange: the original iPhone. And now the much awaited 3G iPhone has just been announced last night by Steve Jobs at the WWDC in San Francisco. It is half the price at US$ 199.- with 3 G capability, and a GPS chip. It is black, but you can avail of a white option if you were to opt for the more expensive (US$ 299) 16 GB. The sound quality is vastly improved too.

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Dates:

October 27, 2008 - October 30, 2008

Location:

Shanghai, China

Venue:

Shanghai New International Expo Centre, Pudong/Shanghai

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Dates:

October 19, 2008 - October 23, 2008

Location:

Dubai, UAE

Venue:

Dubai International Convention and Exhibition Centre

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