Sony Ericsson, Nokia post healthy numbers

In Q1 2007, the company sold 21.8 million units which is a 63 per cent increase over Q1 2006 when it sold a mere 13.3 million units. Yet its operating margin was still 11.8 per cent.

By comparison Motorola has just announced that it made a loss of £90 million and that's its market share - which had reached 22 per cent - had fallen back to 17.5 per cent.

In reality, Sony Ericsson's market share has also slipped slightly - down to just about 8 per cent when it had reached 9 per cent in 2006. It's still ranked as world Number Four ahead of LG and behind Samsung.

The most interesting aspect is sales of music enabled handsets. Sony Ericsson claims that during 2006 it sold an impressive17 million Walkman branded phones whilst it shipped another 43 million units which were capable of playing music but didn't carry the Walkman brand.

By contrast, of course, Nokia estimated it sold around 70 million MP3 enabled devices which put it ahead of even Apple in terms of music players.

In terms of volume, Sony Ericsson signed licensing and development agreement with French manufacturer, Sagem. This should provide Sony Ericsson with models in the entry-level GSM, GPRS and EDGE handset sector.

It will be interesting to see what Qualcomm's reaction to this is, given that the chip vendor claims to have 'essential patents' covering GPRS and EDGE. Sony Ericsson must have inherited quite a few such patents from its parent, Ericsson, too.

Having low cost models will be essential for survival according to market researcher, Global Insight. It says that china and India will between them account for 60 per cent of an expected 1.2 billion new subscribers over the next five years.

Nokia reckons that it has got this one cracked as it claims that 60 per of all its emerging markets business will be derived from existing Nokia handset owners upgrading to a new Nokia. µ