TELECOMS & MOBILE
PDA sales fall again but HP shines
11-11-2003
by
Analyst firm Gartner has brought more bad news for the PDA sector, with shipments of the devices still dropping and the threat from mobile phones growing.
Gartner is reporting that worldwide PDA (Personal Digital Assistant or handheld) shipments declined 0.2 percent in the third quarter of 2003. Although a relatively small decrease, it's the eighth consecutive quarter that the handheld computer market experienced a year-over-year decline in shipments. The biggest drop has been in PDAs that are based on non-mainstream operating systems.
Despite the doom and gloom, the report did contain good news for one firm, Hewlett-Packard. The PDA market would have suffered a much steeper decline if not for strong growth by HP. If HP's results were removed, the PDA market would have declined 13 percent year over year.
HP's worldwide PDA market share reached 23.1 percent in the third quarter of 2003. The firm shipped 581,414 units, which amounted to growth of 98.5 percent. PalmOne remains the market leader in this sector, selling 861,500 units, an improvement of 6.5 percent, leaving the company with a market share of 34.2 percent.
New entrant Dell sold 137,400 units, leaving the Texas firm with a market share of 5.5 percent. RIM (Research in Motion), the maker of the Blackberry, also put in a strong performance, shipping 123,775 machines, an improvement of 107 percent, leaving the firm with a 4.9 percent market share.
Among the big losers was Japanese firm Sony, which shipped 255,360 PDAs, a decline of 24.1 percent, leaving the company with a market share of just above 10 percent. Former contender Toshiba had a poor quarter, selling only 84,496 units, a decline of 41.7 percent. The sector also saw some consolidation, with shipments from the remaining smaller firms down significantly to 473,479, a 46.2 percent drop.
"The PDA industry is struggling with the continuing economic doldrums and by the fact that approximately 70 percent of all PDAs are purchased by consumers with their own funds," said Todd Kort, principal analyst for Gartner's Computing Platforms Worldwide group. "PDA market erosion is also resulting from increasing competition from mobile phones that include similar calendar, address book and other personal information management capabilities that have been fundamental applications of PDAs."
Competition from the mobile phone sector may well be a threat to the future viability of the PDA segment. Recent Gartner figures on mobile handset sales illustrate the issue, with mobile phone sales amounting 114.9 million in the second quarter of 2002. This contrasts to PDA sales this quarter of just over 1 million. Mobile handsets are becoming sophisticated computing devices in their own right and the arrival of standardised operating systems such as Nokia's Series 60 interface for the Symbian OS means that software can be developed for a range of handsets. Given the disparity between sales, developers may be more likely to develop for mobile phones rather than PDAs.
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