IDC revealed in its latest report that smartphone shipments are likely to decline in 2014, but also says that Windows Phone will be the fastest-growing mobile operating platform with a 29.5% annual year-over-year growth.
The research firm claims that 2014 will witness shipments of over 47 million smartphones with Android garnering a 78.9 percent share followed by iOS with 14.9 percent market share this year. IDC added that Android’s share will slip to 76 percent by 2018 while iOS will see a decline of 0.5 percentage points garnering a 14.4 percent share by 2018.
BlackBerry will be hit the hardest with a forecast of just 1 percent share in 2014 declining to 0.3 percent by 2018.
Windows Phone on the other hand is going to witness growth considering the continued support from Nokia and an additional 9 vendors that Microsoft recently signed up.
“Windows Phone stands to grow the fastest among the leading smartphone operating systems with continued support from Nokia as well as the addition of nine new Windows Phone partners. Most of these new vendors come from emerging markets and could help bring the Windows Phone experience to customers there”, notes IDC in its report.
IDC predicts that Microsoft will be shipping 47 million units in 2014 garnering a 3.9 percent share and by 2018, the company will ship 121.8 million units taking up 7 percent share globally marking a 29.5 percent growth – the highest for any platform in comparison.
These shipment numbers aren’t huge as compared to what IDC has forecast for Android and iOS devices as these two platforms will see shipments of 1.32 billion and 249.6 million devices respectively.
IDC notes that the average selling prices for smartphones will be declining across the board for major vendors, but those of Windows Phone will see the largest decrease and this will be one of the primary reasons that Windows Phones smartphones will manage to garner near 30 percent growth over the period of four years.
