Windows Phone sales fall
Already meagre sales fell by an additional 76 percent in the June quarter, reports Gregg Keizer
Sales of Windows Phones plunged 76 percent in the second quarter, plummeting from 8.2 million in 2015 to less than two million this year, researcher Gartner has revealed.
The dramatic decline was more fallout from Microsoft’s botched acquisition of Nokia’s handset business, the writing off of more than $10 billion, and the subsequent decision to back out of the consumer smartphone market.
In a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in July, Microsoft put its smartphone sales at around 1.2 million. (In comparison, Apple sold a ‘disappointing’ 40.4 million iPhones in its last quarter.) The difference between Gartner’s and the Redmond-based firm’s numbers – about 750,000 smartphones – represented what the former believed other device makers sold during the quarter.
As recently as May, Microsoft executives again asserted that the company was not giving up on homegrown smartphones, even as they acknowledged that their efforts needed to be focused better. However, the decline of Windows smartphones is stunning. In 2015’s June quarter, Microsoft’s operating system powered 2.5 percent of all smartphones sold. Twelve months later and Windows’ share of sales had collapsed to less than six tenths of a percentage point.
Microsoft had initially pinned its hopes on Windows on smartphones as a way to grow its operating system’s share on devices of all kinds, even though it was a steep uphill battle against Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS. But Windows never cracked the 5 percent mark as measured by Gartner and its research rival, IDC.
In the end, Windows’ share on smartphones, or on devices overall, became mostly moot as Microsoft turned from that metric and instead focused on growth in its cloud-based services.