Handset market starts to grow

BEANCOUNTERS AT IDC say that the worldwide handset market saw mild growth in the third quarter.

While the growth was pretty bad it improved from the first half of 2009. Handset shipments totalled 287.1 million units worldwide in the third quarter, down 6 per cent from a year earlier, but up 5.6 per cent from the second quarter.

Ramon Llamas, senior research analyst with IDC's mobile devices technology and trends team saod the handset market is showing the first signs of improvement since the onset of the economic downturn.

During the third quarter, IDC saw some channels promoting older devices at significantly lower prices. For many sellers, this apparently was enough to create higher demand and push their volumes higher.

Vendors are setting the stage for further gains by launching their next flagship devices to meet pent-up demand, he said.

The North American market was pretty pants for the third-quarter of 2009. While smartphones and prepaid handsets drove growth, the region was blighted by the Canadian handset market which tanked. The Latin America handset market did not experience a strong recovery in the third quarter as expected.

The Western Europe market showed strong signs of recovery. For the first time this year, both traditional handset and smartphone shipments increased year over year as well as sequentially.

The price erosion from smartphones and low-end handsets helped, along with the new feature phones from LG and Samsung targeting mid-tier segments, IDC said.µ